3B Theater: Micro-Brewed Reviews

Strap In, Boils and Ghouls! This Will Definitely Scare the YELL Out of You!

2025-10-04T10:10:00.000-05:00

That's right. It's that time of year.

For once more, and once again,

Not >Quite< Hubrisween is upon us.

You write five reviews. You post five reviews.

(Six if I can get my act together.)

Watch for updates all October long

at Confirmed, Alan_01.

And Happy Hallowe'en.

Hello, All! Been a While, Hasn’t It? Sit Down, Grab a Brew, and I'll Tell You What We've Been Up to Lately.

2024-08-15T14:41:00.005-05:00

Greetings, Boils and Ghouls, long time no see. Well, I guess we can count this one as a Shameless Plug to help those who wound up here and herd them over to our more recent online endeavors at Confirmed, Alan_01. (Yes. That's a TRON reference.)

Anyhoo, we just completed an exhaustive two part series on Rene Daalder's Massacre at Central High (1976), where we explained the circumstances of how a Dutch filmmaker, an independent distributor out of Chicago, and Russ Meyer of all people came together for one strange little bugaboo of a movie; then try to unravel how a film that was specifically commissioned to be as equally grisly as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1973), with a near double-digit body count, wound up instead an odd and offbeat lesson in civics and an all-out political allegory on the rise and fall of the Third Reich; and then decide if it works and ultimately unravel the film's treacherous path from obscurity to Cult Filmdom.

We also just completed a retrospective / memorial on the early film career of Roger Corman, with completely overhauled and updated reviews on The Gunfighter (1950), The Beast with a Million Eyes (1950), It Conquered the World (1956), Rock All Night (1957), Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961), X! The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963), and a brand new review of The Terror (1963), where we skewer the myth that the production tales of Corman's movies always proved more interesting / entertaining than the film they made. Sort of. We also did a massive update on our old 3B Theater review of Corman's Teenage Caveman (1958).

Here's a list of what we've published so far, including a two-part look at Phil Karlson's Framed (1975) and the rise and fall of Joe Don Baker. And I encourage you, Gentle Readers, that even if you've already read my take on these movies before, each entry has been extensively rewritten and updated -- like these reviews of Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966), Beginning of the End (1957) and Under the Rainbow (1981) -- with an emphasis on proper attribution on a lot of those phantom quotes that have plagued my writing for years. (My bad. Working on it. And now with at least 30% less grammatical atrocities.)

Of course, I'm posting this right before I take off on the usual September Sabbatical, but that also means we'll return in October with something I refer to as Not Quite Hubrisween, where we do a marathon of specific and seasonally appropriate genre films. (Not 26 films though. I'm way too old for that anymore. Wow. How I managed to pull that off for so long is beyond me.) Also of note, we've resurrected The Morgue and the Poster Archive as well.

The end game / goal is to get all of my online writings finally in one place -- with even a few brand new reviews sprinkled in. (All of the old content will remain as is where it is.) And I wouldn't even call these things reviews anymore. Essays maybe? Term papers? Sermons? Treatise? Mindless Ramblings with an Occasional Anecdote? Desperate cries for help? That's me shrugging right now. Either way, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy!

Looking for Something Spooky to Read this Halloween?

2021-10-28T22:05:00.000-05:00

Hello, Boils and Ghouls. Long time, no read. So, about five years ago, I decided to try my hand at writing some fiction again, hoping to get published in an anthology of Ghost Stories whose theme revolved around hauntings near water. And, well, I really threw myself into it -- like, really, really into it and wound up with something way too long to meet the submission requirements. Thus and so, with something way too long for a short story and way too short for anything else, I kinda sat on this piece, unsure what to do with it, but have finally decided to just publish it online myself. And so, for your reading pleasure, I give you, One In, One Out, which turned out less a spooky ghost story and more of a slow-burn creature feature instead. And lets call it an R-Rated story for some dicey language and a few adult themes for those not into such things. Beyond that, please do enjoy this morbid tale of a trip to the lake that goes >slightly< awry that you can read right here. Thanks.

We Live ... Again. Well, Sort Of.

2021-08-15T19:56:00.001-05:00

And so, our film journey begins anew at our new site, Confirmed Alan_01, where we finally try to herd all of my old film reviews, scattered all over the web these past 20 years, into one central location, add some spit and polish, and then republish them. Because, yes, I am THAT anal. So, yeah, mostly old stuff -- from the myriad blogs, the old website, even an old newspaper column. Some completely overhauled, most are expanded, and a few aborted reviews that never quite got finished. And, if I ever get the urge, there might even be a few brand new reviews showing up now and again.

The Rehashed Reviews thus far:

The Amazing Colossal Man (1957)

Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961)

Roy Colt and Winchester Jack (1970)

Beyond the Doors (1984)

Roustabout (1964)

So Evil, So Young (1961)

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988)

So, Boils and Ghouls, come and give a read, won't you? Thank you.

Hubrisween 2020 :: Z is for Zombie 5: Killing Birds (1987)

2020-10-31T01:04:00.002-05:00

Since this movie fails most epically to make this even remotely clear, whose confusion is compounded even further by the anachronistic model of semi slowly rolling toward us on a lonely stretch of road, I will clue you all in that we’re supposed to be back in 1965 as a hitchhiking Vietnam veteran, still dressed in his fatigues, hops out of the rig and makes his way into the surrounding bayou on foot.

Mustered out and returning home, we see by his insignia that this man was a Lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division, whose mascot is a Screaming Eagle, which seems appropriate when he reaches his palatial home and we see half of it has been dedicated to an aviary filled with all manner of different species of birds -- both foreign and domestic.

And while the soundtrack is needling toward the ominous as the soldier reaches into his duffel-bag, he only pulls out a small wrapped present. And as we once again struggle to read the scene properly, I believe we are to presume this is a surprise homecoming visit and the present was meant for the man’s wife -- whom he finds in their bed, sound asleep, cuddled up beside another man like a couple of spoons ... Uh-oh.

None too happy about this turn of events, in a fit of rage, the veteran pulls out his combat knife and slices the other man’s throat while he sleeps. He then leaves this bloody mess for his sound-sleeper of a wife to wake up to, who screams and panics, and then tries to call for help -- but he apparently took out the phone lines, too.

And then her terrible no good very bad day continues when her car won’t start either. Here, the husband finally reveals himself, and then chases her into the aviary and makes with the stabby, stabby, stabby.

But then an older couple shows up with a baby -- again, you will have no clue who these people were supposed to be until the closing credits. Thus and so, I will help out the audience once more, and reveal these folks are the late wife’s parents and the baby is their little boy, whom they had been babysitting and were returning home.

Well, better make that they were her parents, as the dad gets a knife planted in his skull, and then the mom leads our deranged vet on a merry chase into the woods, where she is finally rundown and gets her throat slit from ear to ear. But the baby is spared for now at least.

Moving back to the house, the man then proceeds to destroy every caged bird that isn’t a raptor. (We’ll assume those were the wife’s.) Now, this proves a tad counterproductive as he continues to clean up the crime scene, when one of the hawks takes all this murder personally, swoops over, and claws one of the man’s eyes out rather gruesomely.

Now, I'm gonna pause here for a little more conjecturing on behalf of the audience. So, see, what I think might've actually happened here, as once again, with this movie, who the hell knows for sure, but, while he was trying to stab his wife, our killer accidentally stabbed and killed one of the raptors when its stand got knocked over. And then later, as he was cleaning up the blood, we zoom in on another raptor, who I think we're supposed to realize is suddenly overcome with a vision or memory of the now dead raptor, and then moved to his avenge its friend or maybe mate. Or something. *sigh* This [expletive deleted] movie.

Anyhoo, cut to a hospital, where the man, now totally blind, has been treated for his wounds and taken into custody; but he’s allowed to say goodbye to his baby boy before being hauled away to jail and the child is surrendered to social services.

Keeping with the theme, what follows next isn’t much of a transition; and so, a chronal alert is probably in order that we are now in the present day -- circa 1987; and according to a handy sign, on the campus of Loyola University, which is located deep in the heart of Louisiana bayou country, where if the heat don't kill ya, the humidity will gladly finish you off. Here, we meet Steven Porter (Watts), an ornithology major, who just got word that his grant was approved, meaning full-funding for an expedition into the wild to try and locate and document the endangered Ivory Billed Woodpecker before the species inevitably goes extinct within the next few years.

And with that, Steve tours the campus to round-up his team for this scientific endeavor, starting with his friend, Paul (Villemaire), a photographer, and his assistant / girlfriend, Mary (Cumming). He then seeks out Rob (Sutterfield), an amateur 8-bit computer animated porn enthusiast, who will use his tech-skills to correlate all the data they gather on his handy portable computer (-- a proto-laptop IBM PC Convertible 5140, which resembles more of an old whang ‘n’ banger typewriter to me), to try and narrow down the search parameters for the elusive bird. And then there’s Jennifer, who is Steve’s assistant and maybe his girlfriend; or she wants to be his girlfriend or, hell, I don’t know.

Also shoehorning her way into this expedition is Anne (Wendel), a reporter for the campus newspaper, who wants to cover Steve’s efforts, thinking it will make a good story. Now, I believe Anne also used to be Steve’s girlfriend -- stress on the “used to be,” who may or may not have fanagled her way onto this trip just to try and hook back up with him. Maybe. Again, movie, a little help here?

Either way, Jennifer always seems to get a little defensively pissy whenever Anne is around. And she almost lucks out when Steve first refuses to allow Anne to join them until the crack newshound reveals how she was able to track down the last three known people to have actually seen a bona fide Ivory Billed Woodpecker in the wild.

Thus, Anne is now in, and then the expedition is rounded out by Brian (Maggiore), a park ranger, who came with the van, and who will serve as their trail guide as they venture deep into the swamps and bayous in search of their rare prey.

But once they hit the road, turns out Anne’s big scoop wasn’t much of a scoop after all because of those three witnesses she located (-- technically, her bullied assistant did the heavy lifting on this), one of them is dead, another now lives in California, and the third, Dr. Fredric Brown, is now blind according to her (assistant's) research.

Now, Anne has a full dossier on Brown’s sketchy history but isn’t too keen on sharing what she knows with the others for … reasons. (If I had to guess, I’d say it has to do with why we never saw the killer’s face in the prologue -- he typed ominously....) Anyhoo, Steve still thinks it might be worth talking to the guy. And when they arrive at his house, Steve tells the others to wait in the van and he’ll go talk to him alone. Not a chance, says Anne, who once more bullies her way into another fact-finding mission with Steve, which really pisses off Jennifer as she gets left behind with a “snooze you lose” smirk from her rival.

Alas, no one appears to be home when they knock, but the door proves unlocked, which is an open invitation for Anne to barge right on in. But as they snoop around the house, it becomes readily apparent that they aren’t alone. Then suddenly, a man startles them from behind. And when they spin around, they are greeted with quite the gruesome sight:

For you see, the reason Dr. Brown (Vaughn) has gone blind was due to some massive eye-trauma. Like, say, oh, I don’t know, a horked-off bird ripped them out of their sockets?

That’s right, Boils and Ghouls; the man they sought was none other than the deranged Vietnam vet who murdered his wife, his wife’s lover, and her parents some 20 years ago. As to why is this man not still in jail for multiple murder? Oh, we’ll be getting to that, believe me. That, and plenty more rock-stupid twists yet to come, which we will effort to unravel when we come right back after the hows and whys. Ergo, insert the standard outro ellipsis right about here...

Now, with all the quantum leaps in plot logic, the failure to properly establish shifts in time, and an overall narrative that seems to be stitched together with vague ideas and the barest of notions, I could understand why a lot of you might think Zombie 5: Killing Birds (1987) was written and directed by our old pal Claudio Fragasso, who, you remember, was partially responsible for Zombie 3 (1988) and who was totally responsible for Zombie 4: After Death (1989), which were technically made after this latest sequel anyway, adding a whole ‘nother layer of confusion to this damnably confounding franchise.

But this one actually wasn’t Fragrasso’s fault -- well, maybe, as he would later claim the general idea for the film was stolen from him and his usual partner in crime, Rossella Drudi. (More on this in a sec.) In fact, no one knows for sure who really did direct Zombie 5, as that dubious honor is currently under dispute between Claudio Lattanzi and another well-known purveyor of crap, Aristide Massaccesi -- better known to the world as one Joe D’Amato, who was responsible for things like Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980), Antropophagus (1980), Ator, the Fighting Eagle (1982), and a metric-ton of Emmanuelle (1974) sequels -- some legit, others not so much.

Now, according to most unearthed sources, Zombie 5:Killing Birds officially began life around Christmas of 1986, when Lattanzi wrote up a treatment for a film called Il cancello obsoleto (The Obsolete Gate), which concerned a record producer inviting a rock band to some deserted house, where they would record a new hit album, unaware a squad of Nazi soldiers were also buried there, who rise from the grave and run amok.

Lattanzi was a protege of Michele Soavi, serving as an assistant director on Dario Argento's World of Horror (1985) documentary and the truly mesmerizing StageFright (1987), which had been produced by D’Amato for Filmirage. Filmirage and D’Amato were also interested in producing Lattanzi’s idea, too, which Soavi was initially attached to as a director -- only to back out when he was offered to make another sequel to Demons (1985) for Argento, which eventually morphed into The Church (1989).

From there, things get a little murky. In a later interview, Lattanzi stated at this point D’Amato asked for a complete overhaul on his treatment, and was instructed to remove the rock band and the Nazi zombies and replace them with a scientific expedition and killer birds -- perhaps to cash in on Rene Cardona Jr.’s El ataque de los pájaros (1987), which was released on home video as Beaks: The Movie, where our fine feathered friends go berserk en masse and start attacking people. He complied, changing the title to Artigli (Talons), which D’Amato rejected, saying it sounded too much like a documentary about felines and settled on Uccidere gli uccelli -- Killing Birds.

This treatment was then expanded into a screenplay by Daniele Stroppa, who had written Convent of Sinners (1986) for D’Amato and Delirium (1987) for Lamberto Bava, which was punched up for English speaking audiences by Sheila Goldberg, who had done the same for StageFright, Argento’s Phenomena (1985) and Umberto Lenzi’s Ghosthouse (1986). Later, both Fragrasso and Drudi claimed the original idea for the film came from them, but there is signed documentation that proved otherwise; and so, the treatment came from Lattanzi with an assist from Bruna Antonucci, which officially settles who wrote Killing Birds / Zombie 5 but not who directed it.

Yeah, we kinda got a Steven Spielberg or Tobe Hooper Poltergeist (1982) situation here. And while Lattanzi is the credited director, others say that, no, D’Amato was in charge. According to Antonio Bonifacio, Killing Birds’ assistant director, Lattanzi was just a front for D’Amato, who could not be credited as both producer and director on too many films due to union rules. Lattanzi had no idea how to direct, said Bonifacio, but D’Amato had him on set “in case a journalist or anyone else dropped by.” And it was this way from the beginning, meaning D’Amato didn’t take over mid-production when Lattanzi floundered as other sources claim.

Lattanzi, meanwhile, always stated the film was a total collaboration between the two, done "in symbiosis.” D’Amato himself never denied this, saying, "It seemed to me that the most sensible thing was to give the job of directing the dialogues to (Soavi's) assistant, Claudio Lattanzi, while I took care of the special-effects scenes. In the end, I let (Lattanzi) sign as the director.” And for the record, D’Amato would also serve as the film’s cinematographer under the name Fred Sloniscko Jr., which was one of his many aliases, including Arizona Massachusset, Michael Wotruba, David Hills, Robert Yip and Joan Russell.

Again, I’m not sure why anyone would want to stake a claim as being responsible for Zombie 5: Killing Birds because it contains no zombies and only one bird attack, which happens in the first five minutes of the film; though our protagonists are constantly under surveillance by these alleged avian adversaries, which leads to absolutely nothing. Oh, sure, I think Lattanzi and D’Amato want us to think these vengeful birds are influencing what’s been happening but I think I’m about done connecting the dots for these yo-yos.

At face value, what we have here then is a ghost story, wrapped up in a few slasher tropes, that also wants to be a killer animal movie. It also tries really hard at being a mystery, too, but this is totally bungled from the get-go as our co-directors try to hide the fact that the killer from the prologue and Dr. Brown was the same person, which might have been suspenseful if handled properly when these plot threads collide, but, nope.

Thus, this only causes more confusion instead of clearing anything up -- like, Why isn’t Brown still in jail? Well, get this: apparently, before the bird gouged out his eyes, Brown hid all the bodies of his victims; and with no bodies, the authorities couldn’t make any murder charges stick and he was set free. However, he did lose custody of his child. At least I think that’s what we are to assume since, once again, again, the film just kinda lets this plot turd float in the ether.

And while he did lose his eyesight to one of them, Brown still has a passion for birds; only he now “watches them” by listening to them and recording and analyzing their calls, which he then demonstrates for his uninvited guests after he puts on a pair of dark glasses to hide his off-putting deformity.

Asked what brought them to see him, Steve wants to know anything the man can tell him about the Ivory Billed Woodpecker. But Brown says that’s a lost cause, fearing the bird is now long gone. But as they thank him for his time and move to leave, Brown has a sudden change of heart and says to wait as he moves to a bureau and starts rifling through a drawer.

Here, a curious Anne spots a photo of a woman among the jumbled contents and starts to ask about it -- only to be interrupted by Steve, feeling she’s being rude since the man obviously can’t see what she's talking about. When Brown finally finds what he was feeling for, he hands over a file folder full of maps, saying these will help them in their search, and then sends them on their way with a sincere hope that Steve finds what he is looking for -- and by sincere I mean odds are good if Steve follows that map he and the others will most likely never be seen alive again.

On the way back to the van, Anne gets upset at Steve for not letting her follow through on the photo. When asked why it was so important, Anne finally reveals what she knew all along about Brown and his family’s “disappearance” after he returned from a tour in Vietnam. Was this photo of Brown’s dead wife? Anne sure seems to think so, and wanted to confirm this before Steve blew it for her. (For the record, it was.)

But this intriguing thread is then summarily dropped for an extended montage of Steve’s crew out in the mucklands, happily photographing and documenting a bunch of birds -- only the one they seek remains stubbornly elusive. But as the day drags on, they slowly realize they have somehow become hopelessly lost.

Now technically, this was not Bryan, the guide who came with the van’s, fault as they make mention of a thick fog that sprung from nowhere -- only there is no fog. Seriously. There’s nary a vapor. But! The filmmakers apparently subbed in some Vaseline smeared over the lens to simulate, well, something that really doesn’t look like fog. At all.

Anyhoo, as this bunch of boobs stumble around in the broad smears of daylight as if they can’t see a foot in front of their face, trying to find the van, they find a derelict and rusted out truck instead. And upon further investigation, they find a rotted corpse manning the cab!

And as the screams erupt from the womenfolk, panic grips the whole expedition as they bolt away, deeper into the marshes and wetlands, until they come upon a palatial house in the middle of nowhere.

With not much daylight left, the decision is made to seek shelter there for the night and resume the search for the van in the morning. After they get inside and determine it’s been long deserted, we get another montage of their extensive search of the house -- from the old generator in the basement, to the cobwebs in the attic, and all points in between.

But it’s Jennifer who makes the most ominous discovery, when she finds the long abandoned aviary, meaning our group has stumbled into the murder-house from the opening prologue -- only they don’t know this.

Meantime, as Bryan, the guide who came with the van, and Rob fight to get the stubborn generator to fire up -- an OSHA nightmare contraption that is basically a Stephen King novel just waiting to happen, which finally complies, Anne and Mary find a duplicate photo of the one in Brown’s drawer, which reveals Brown and his wife from a happier time.

But as Anne studies it intently, a mold outbreak of some sort quickly blots out the whole picture as if by magic --(or a shitty special effect). She then joins the others in the main room, where they discover Steve is missing.

And where is Steve? Well, the better question might be when is Steve as he is apparently lost in some kind of phantasmagorical time loop as he searches the house, enters a room, and is suddenly transported back to 1965, where he finds the bloody after math of Brown's rampage.

He then hears a strange tapping coming from the next room, where he spies Brown feeling his way into the house. Terrified of him for some reason, Steve quickly flees into the aviary, once again teeming with birds, where he finds a zombified woman preparing a bottle for her baby.

Terrified by this, he flees back into the house proper, where where he finds Anne crucified onto the wall with her throat slit -- who then smiles at him! With that, the sinister house, which had been giving off bad vibes to him ever since they arrived, essentially herds him deeper inside by blowing open doors until the last one swings open to reveal the others impatiently waiting for him in the main hall.

But before you can ask, What the hell is going on here?!?, the others decide to call it a night. Unaware that some thing is now lurking around outside the house, Paul and Mary split off on their own. Steve is too wired from his waking nightmare to sleep, and so Rob decides to stay up, too, tinkering with his portable computer, which is currently on the fritz. Meantime, Anne asks Jennifer if she’d like to bunk together, which gets her a big fat hell no.

Yeah, Jen has been fuming all day as Anne and Steve got chummier and chummier as it went along. And now she is so mad, the girl storms off by herself, back to the aviary, where she runs into some kind of zombie-mummy-moss monster hybrid, which attacks her.

But the girl manages to retreat into a pantry, where she doesn’t realize another soggy ghoul was already hiding, who proceeds to bash her head into the wall until it's nothing more than a bloody wet pulp.

Now, all this while, Mary gets startled awake by a terrible dream she was having, where a man in combat fatigues found her in bed and sliced her throat open. Shaken, she moves to the window and sees Jennifer as she first enters the aviary.

From there, her point of view is a bit obscured but the girl is certain something is attacking Jennifer and tries to wake up Paul so they can go and save her.

Meantime, Anne and Steve are talking and rekindling a few old flames. Obviously, Steve is still freaked out a bit about his earlier ghostly encounter, and he confesses to Anne there’s something strangely familiar about this place just as Mary and Paul burst in and say something has happened to Jennifer.

But a quick check of the aviary and surrounding rooms show no sign of her -- though they do miss her broken and bloodied glasses discarded on the floor. Thus, they split up and start searching the rest of the house.

Now, Bryan, the guide who came with the van, gets to search the basement, where he notices the old generator is leaking fuel all over the floor. And as he continues to search for the missing girl, the man doesn’t realize a small, zig-zagging line of flame is slowly trailing him.

And when it finally catches up, Bryan, the guide who came with the van, erupts in flames and goes screaming into the night -- quite the spectacular stunt, I might add. Kudos to the stuntman involved on the full body burn here.

Anyhoo, the other groups see Bryan, the guide who came with the van who is now on fire, as the human fireball disappears into the trees. And with a bit of a callous shrug, the search for the still missing Jennifer continues, though most are starting to feel there is something seriously wrong with this house, and maybe, just maybe, they should all just leave.

And, hey! Lookatthat! The fog machine is finally working as Paul and Rob stumble around in the thick mist, looking for their missing friend, and come upon the van! But then they hear Mary scream, which sends them running back to the house.

Seems she and the others have finally found what's left of Jennifer. And with that, when the others are alerted that the van has been found, it's unanimously agreed that they all need to get the hell out of there.

But Rob insists he must return to the evil house one last time to retrieve his precious computer first. This he does, while the others load up in the van, where they realize Bryan, the guide who came with the van, who was on fire, and is now most likely dead, had the keys.

Luckily, after Rob gets in and out of the house from hell okay, he says he can hot-wire the van and sets to work crossing-wires. But he's soon interrupted when the vehicle comes under assault by not one, but two, zombie-mummy-moss monsters!

And after one of these creatures punches out a back window, seizes Mary, and partially rips her head off, the van is quickly abandoned and the last four survivors -- Steven, Anne, Rob and Paul, return to the possessed house.

And while the others start ripping up floorboards to barricade the doors and windows, Rob starts running a new program on his computer, certain it can help them figure out and how to solve just what in the hell is going on here.

But his work is interrupted when the generator conks out, forcing Rob and Paul to head to the basement to try and get it running again. And while he does manage to patch the leak and refill the reservoir with what precious fuel is left, when the machine is cranked back up, the compass Rob was wearing around his neck gets caught up in the gears, sucking him into the machine, where part of his hand is torn apart before the tightening strap caught around his neck essentially decapitates him.

Upstairs, Anne and Steve check on Rob’s abandoned computer, which was beeping incessantly. But all the screen says is, Welcome home, Steve. Then, Paul returns and makes his dreadful after action report just as those muck-monsters start trying to break down the door.

But while the barricades seem to hold, the creatures then eschew the doors and windows altogether and just burst through the walls instead, seizing Anne! Working fast, the men are able to free her, allowing them to retreat up into the attic.

This only proves a brief respite though, as another creature punches-in through the roof, seizes Paul by the head and pulls him up through the jagged hole, where he promptly gets stuck while his throat is torn out.

Thus and so, as their dead friend hangs there, swinging gently in the breeze, Anne and Steve, who believes this was all somehow his fault, brace for the worst.

Meantime, Dr. Brown, whose fault all of this really is, hears a certain raptor calling and realizes he's heard that screech before, and it was the same bird who had attacked him 20 years ago. (Note to self. Do not Google life-expectancy of raptor birds. Wait. Maybe both birds are ghosts now?) He also seems to sense something terribly bad has happened at his old house, grabs his walking stick, and heads off into the bayou to meet his fate.

Meanwhile, as the sun comes up, the creature attacks seem to have abated and Steve and Anne decide to risk it and manage to escape the attic unscathed. Here, they run into Brown, who takes a bit of a last second plot dump, saying the house is possessed by evil that feeds on the fear of others. And the stronger the fear, the more powerful and deadly the malevolent spirits become.

And after confirming Steve’s parentage, Brown then tells the other two to go, saying the house doesn’t want them. No. He knows what it really wants and defiantly stays behind, feeling no one can fear what they cannot see,

But as Steve and Anne flee the house, they look back when we suddenly hear Brown screaming, which is quickly drowned out by the cacophony of the swarming, vengeful birds as the frame freezes and the end credits roll.

Zombie 5: Killing Birds was filmed on location in Thibodaux, Louisiana, with a very small crew. The main shooting location might look a little familiar to you, too, as it was the same house used in Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (1981). It was also shot in sync-sound with no overdubbing, which was actually pretty rare for an Italian production of this budget.

But the production’s big get was Robert Vaughn, who plays the older Brown. Taking a detour between productions in Manila and Spain, to his credit, the actor was very professional and didn’t mail anything in. And the only real problem I had with his character was the special make-up for his damaged eyes, which someone rightfully pointed out looks like “he got to the set late and had to put it on himself without the benefit of a mirror.” Special-effects artists Robert Gold and Harry Harris fared a little better in the eye-gouging scene, which is delightfully gruesome -- because no one does eyeball trauma better than the Italians.

The rest of the grue during the myriad murder set-pieces were also pretty spectacular -- though they were all telegraphed pretty badly in earlier scenes, with special mention for Rob’s, who is ground up in the generator, and Mary’s, who is torn up in the van, while Paul’s is a pretty shameless grope at reenacting a set-piece from D’Amato’s notorious Anthropophagus. And while I wouldn’t technically call them zombies, I thought those muck monsters were pretty cool.

To be fair, I don’t think they were ever intended to be zombies in the first place but the malevolent manifestations of those people Brown had killed, which were in turn resurrected by the birds -- if I'm reading the tea leaves right. And to be even more fair, Killing Birds wasn’t officially roped into being an unofficial Zombie (1979) sequel until it was released on home video in the aughts, explaining how the feature predates both Zombie 3 and Zombie 4.

Now, I know I’ve already talked ad nauseum about the convoluted history of this franchise in my earlier reviews of Zombie, Zombie 3 and Zombie 4: After Death, and why there is technically no Zombie 2 even though there is. Sort of. But to sum up (and taking a deep breath):

It all began when Argento recut George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) for its Italian release as Zombi, which sprung an unofficial sequel with Fulci’s Zombi 2, which was then released in the States by Jerry Gross as Zombie, and when Fulci made Zombi 3, which was his long awaited sequel to Zombi 2, which was released as Zombie, remember, and extensively reworked by Fragrasso and Bruno Mattei, it was released as Zombie 3 everywhere else, explaining where Zombie 2 went, sort of, which was then followed up by Fragrasso’s Zombie 4: After Death, and from there, we get into home video releases, where no less than 14 films staked a claim to being a sequel to Zombi 2 / Zombie, including Andrea Bianchi's Burial Ground (1981), which was released on VHS as Zombi 3: Nights of Terror; and Marino Girolami's Zombie Holocaust (1980) used both aliases of Zombi 3 and Doctor Butcher M.D, and José Luis Merino’s The Hanging Woman (1973) also later passed as Zombie 3: Return of the Living Dead, and don’t forget Mattei’s Hell of the Living Dead also circulated as both Zombie 3: Zombie Inferno and as Zombi 4, while Jess Franco’s A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973) also, you guessed it, was released as Zombi 4, which brings us to part five, where we got both Killing Birds and Zombi 5: Revenge in the House of Usher (1982), and then came Zombi 6: Absurd (1986), and then came Zombi 7: Anthropophagus, which we’ve already discussed. Got all of that? Good.

As for Killing Birds or Zombie 5 or Zombie 5: Killing Birds or whatever, well, honestly, it had a pretty decent premise that was then totally bungled in the execution -- aside from a few of those spectacular kills. Like with a lot of Italian genre films it has its own internal logic that must be cracked and adds a whole 'nother layer of WTF to unravel -- namely when you start getting into the preternatural anthropomorphic bird angle. Yup. Wasn't the spirit of his dead wife out to get Brown and the others, but a falcon out to avenge his buddy from beyond the grave. But it’s more frustrating than bad, if that helps at all. And with this franchise, as it grinds on indefinitely, I will take all the help I can get.

And that, as the kids say, is that. 26 days. 26 films. 26 reviews. Finis. Hope you all enjoyed this not so brief resurrection as much as I did, my ever faithful Boils and Ghouls. Will I ever return again? No man can say for sure. Happy Hallowe'en, one and all. And then, just like that, as if he were an apparition fading in the sunlight after a long and harrowing night, he was gone.

Zombie 5: Killing Birds (1987) Filmirage :: Flora Film / P: Joe D'Amato / D: Joe D'Amato, Claudio Lattanzi / W: Claudio Lattanzi, Daniele Stroppa, Sheila Goldberg / C: Joe D'Amato / E: Kathleen Stratton / M: Carlo Maria Cordio / S: Lara Wendel, Timothy W. Watts, Leslie Cumming, James Villemaire, Sal Maggiore, James Sutterfield, Lin Gathright, Brigitte Paillet, Nona Paillet, Robert Vaughn

Hubrisween 2020 :: Y is for You'll Find Out (1940)

2020-10-30T03:30:00.003-05:00

We open at the end -- of the show, that is, as bandleader Kay Kyser wraps up the latest edition of his weekly radio program, whose grand finale allows the spotlight to fall on all of his featured performers: Ginny Simms, Harry Babbitt, Sully Mason, and the dower-faced comedy relief of trumpeter, Ish Kabibble (-- a/k/a Merwyn Bogue).

Meanwhile, watching all of this from the sponsor's booth, the band's manager, Chuck Deems (O'Keefe), hashes out their next gig with his girl, Janis Bellacrest (Parrish). Seems being Chuck's girlfriend has its perks and advantages; namely having Kyser and the whole gang perform a private show for your 21st birthday party at stately Bellacrest Manor.

But after the show ends and the theater empties, a sense of foreboding looms and shadowy figures lurk about; and then Janis almost gets flattened by a runaway car! And while Chuck assumes the near hit-and-run driver was drunk, Janis feels something far more sinister is at work as this was her fourth brush with a fatal catastrophe in just as many days.

Now, her growing suspicions of foul play all lead back to one Prince Saliano; a mystical medium, who Janis feels has bamboozled her aunt Margo, to whom Janis' late father -- the renowned explorer Elmer Bellacrest, put in charge of the family fortune until his daughter comes of age. Having convinced her aunt that only he can channel the spirits of the dead, meaning they can communicate with her father, Janis isn't so easily swayed and believes Saliano is nothing but a fake, who is just leeching money from her family -- and part of Janis' plan during the big birthday celebration this weekend is to expose these shenanigans and send the charlatan packing.

And to those ends, she's also contacted Dr. Karl Fenninger, a famous skeptic and spiritualist debunker, who’s agreed to attend her party as well. So, we got some big band swing, seances, and murder on the playlist. Man ‘o’ man, but if this ain’t shaping up to be one helluva birthday party weekend...

STUDENTS!

Quick: I'll bet you can't name the only movie that stars Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorre -- a fine triumvirate of the Grand Masters of Horror if I do so declare, and I do, all at the same time? Well, the answer is, You'll Find Out. [You're supposed to say "When?"] No, it's You'll Find Out. [Now get a little indignant and say "Fine. Just tell me when."] Hah. No. You don't understand. The name of the movie is You'll Find Out. [Now get even more indignant and say, "I gave up, already. What is it? I don't have all day, Sparky."] Third base.

Okay, enough of these Abbott and Costello shenanigans, we're talking about David Butler’s You'll Find Out (1940), which was the second movie vehicle for bandleader Kay Kyser and his swinging big band. Here, the Ol' Professor and the collective head of knuckle known as The Kollege of Musical Knowledge goes toe to toe with a trio of super-cool ghouls while trying to survive a dark and stormy night in a secluded haunted mansion, that's honeycombed with death-traps and a ton of secret passages, and put the kibosh on a nefarious murder plot and inheritance grab!

Apparently, James King Kern Kyser couldn't read music, couldn't sing, and couldn't play an instrument (-- and to some he couldn't act, either), but he had such charisma and popularity while attending the University of North Carolina that several friends asked him to be the conductor and front-man for their fledgling musical combo. When Kyser accepted, he adopted his middle initial and Kay Kyser was born. And since the band kinda stunk, they had to overcompensate with the wild antics and stunts from their bandleader to land any gigs.

But over time they got better, adding more experienced musicians, singers, and arrangers -- but kept the stunts and antics in anyway. Blessed with some good vocal talent with Simms, Babbit and Mason, Kyser was also provided a solid comedic foil for his hyperactivity in the form of Merwyn's Ish Kabibble -- which is Yiddish for "What, me worry?"

And now that I think about it, there is more than a passing resemblance between Merwyn and Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Neumann.

Anyway, as the band improved and started getting steady playdates, it became pretty popular regionally in the 1930s. And one of those steady gigs was at the Blackhawk Club in Chicago, Illinois; and it was there, on amateur night, that Kay's Klass was born, where he would good-naturedly rib and quiz the locals. This would eventually morph into the full-blown and out of control chaos of the Kollege of Musical Knowledge, where contestants competed with each other and the audience for cash prizes. Soon after, the show was picked up nationally and exploded, resulting in eleven number one records and 35 more in the Billboard's Top Ten.

Naturally, Hollywood soon came calling, seven times in total, as Kyser and his band first answered the bell with That's Right -- You're Wrong (1939), which proved to be a big enough hit but was more of a traditional Hollywood musical. But their second feature, You'll Find Out, was going to be a little different.

Remember, at the time of the production, another phenomenon was taking place in the movies. Comedian and radio personality Bob Hope had just zinged his way through two very successful murder in the haunted mansion mysteries with Paulette Goddard: The Cat and the Canary (1939) and The Ghost Breakers (1940). And Red Skelton would go on to star in similar vehicles as The Fox, starting with the hilarious Whistling in the Dark. (1941); as would Milton Berle in Whispering Ghost (1942).

Deciding this formula would also provide a good framework for Kyser and his antics, RKO arranged to throw a trio of Boogie-Woogie-Bogeymen at him -- stress on the BOO, who were all waiting, blades sharpened, nooses knotted, and poisons percolating as Kyser’s tour bus bounces toward the secluded Bellacrest mansion.

Seems the only way to reach it is by a single solitary road that’s bottle-necked by a narrow wooden bridge over an insurmountable chasm, which they cross just as the prerequisite thunderstorm breaks wide open!

Thus and so, as lightning flashes and thunder booms (-- but oddly enough, it never starts raining), while the rest of the band unloads the equipment and sets up, Kay and Chuck take a tour of their kooky venue. And, well, turns out Bellacrest Manor is basically Robert Ripley's wet dream, teeming with exotic and oddball artifacts that were collected by Elmer Bellacrest during his world travels. And some of this collection would prove deadly, as we get some plot specific details about a blow-gun and some poison darts adorning the wall, which will most likely come into play later.

We're then introduced to daffy Aunt Margo (Kruger), who immediately latches on to Kyser, who in turn has a hard time prying her loose. Somehow, Aunt Margo has gotten it into her head that Kyser believes in all this supernatural goobledy-gook, too, and is anxious to "pierce the veil" and talk to the dead with him.

Also lurking about is Elmer's old partner, Spencer Mainwaring (Karloff). Apparently, Mainwaring was present while Elmer was looting -- sorry, “collecting” artifacts from an African temple when the natives caught him and cashed in his chips.

Later, after finally detaching Margo from his hip, Kyser finds his assigned bedroom; and while changing for the show, he's spooked by a reflection of someone standing behind him. Meet Prince Saliano (Lugosi), who warns Kyser this house is full of spirits -- and those spirits don't like the skeptical.

Meanwhile, this creepy evening wouldn't be complete without a shadowy, cloaked figure lurking about the house and grounds. And as Janis and Ginny dress for the party, Janis suddenly spots just such a figure lingering outside her window and screams.

But when Ginny checks outside, whoever it was has disappeared. Here, when Ginny's dress gets caught in the door and is ruined, Janis insists she wear one of her gowns to the party.

Meantime, in the hallway, through a secret panel hidden behind a mask hanging on the opposite wall, sinister eyes watch their door; and then that plot-specific blowgun slides out of the mask's mouth. When the door opens, the killer, mistaking Ginny for Janis due to that wardrobe malfunction, takes deadly aim! But suddenly, lightning crashes, thunder booms, and the house is plunged into darkness, causing Janis to scream again. This time, her cries bring the whole band a-running.

Luckily, when the lights come on, no one is hurt but Kyser does notice one of those deadly darts sticking in the wall near Ginny's ear. After everyone clears off, Kyser corrals Chuck to show him the dart but, during the confusion, it has mysteriously disappeared. (For the record: the last to leave the scene was Mainwaring.)

Convinced there’s a killer running loose in this nuthouse, Kyser wants to call off the concert until Chuck reveals Janis' dire situation. No problem, says the cowardly Kyser, who offers they'll just take her with them when they vamoose post-haste.

But as they start to round everyone up to go, the house is abruptly rocked by an explosion! And when the din dies down, Mainwaring announces that a lightning strike has detonated the bridge(!), meaning everyone there is indefinitely stuck. Coincidentally, the phone-lines have conked out as well, he typed ominously.

Now, before the bridge went boom, half of the birthday party guests had already arrived: about a dozen debutantes; and with their beaus all stuck on the other side of the gorge, Harry, Sully, and Ish try to substitute themselves to no avail. And since they're stuck here anyway, Janis talks Kyser into going ahead with the show. He agrees, and several catchy musical numbers later, the whole company adjourns to another room for cocktails.

Here, Janis and Chuck let Kyser in on their plan to expose Saliano. The only problem is their ace, Dr. Fenninger, is probably stuck on the other side of the demolished bridge. But just as they write him off, Mainwaring has a surprise for everyone and introduces Fenninger (Lorre). Fenninger also apologizes to Janis; seems he was the one outside her window earlier, having arrived early, unannounced, to snoop the place out.

After dinner is announced, as Mainwaring and Fenninger linger behind while the others file into the dining room, their duplicitous nature is exposed when Fenninger angrily asks why the girl is still alive? But Mainwaring says not to worry; he has another scheme for yet another untimely accident for poor Janis. They just need to get Saliano to hold another séance -- and an opportunity presents itself when Kyser stumbles back in, looking for a misplaced cigarette case, allowing Fenninger to trick him into challenging Saliano to prove he isn't a faker. Saliano accepts this challenge, but warns, "To those who scoff, the spirits consider no punishment too drastic."

Setting up in the main ballroom, Saliano's meditation tent is pitched in the center and by each entrance he places a deadly electronic flytrap, meaning anyone trying to enter or leave during the séance will be flash-fried to a crisp. Then, when the lights go down and the festivities commence, as Fenninger and Mainwaring lurk about, Saliano asks for volunteers to sit in a semi-circle and manages to herd Janis into the chair directly underneath the chandelier -- so I'm guessing Saliano must be in on this conspiracy, too.

After the Mystic enters his tent so he can go into his trance in private(!), what follows, actually, is a fairly effective and creepy sequence as the summoned poltergeist activity turns from playful to sinister before a strange voice sounds-off, announcing it's ethereal presence.

Then, a ghostly dismembered head of some tribesman appears in the darkness, chanting "I killed Bellacrest" over and over; and when this apparition disappears, it's replaced by the glowing head of Elmer Bellacrest himself!

And as his spirit implores Janis to believe in Saliano, totally entranced, the girl swoons and slips off the chair -- mere seconds before the chandelier falls and crushes it!

Well, having had enough excitement for one night, everyone decides to turn in, revealing Chuck and Kyser have to bunk together. Not taking any chances, they’ve sealed the room before climbing into bed. But when they turn out the lights, a ghostly flame appears -- closer, closer, and closer it comes until it leaps into bed with them, triggering pure pandemonium. But once they get the lights back on, the two men discover it was just Ish Kabbible's dog, Prince, whose tail is covered in a phosphorus paint.

Sussing out the secret passage the dog used to get in their locked bedroom, the duo investigates and manage to get attacked by a stuffed gorilla, stumble into even more secret passages, and then promptly get separated.

Alone, Kyser finds a hidden control room; and even without the glowing masks of the native and Bellacrest sitting on a shelf it doesn't take a rocket-scientist to figure out that this is the equipment Saliano uses to pull off his trickery. But, you gotta remember who we're dealing with here.

However, sharper eyes will be rewarded with all kinds of secret toy surprises with this discovery if you look really close at the menagerie of props on Saliano's shelves, where you can spot several stop-motion models left over from King Kong (1933), including several creatures from the notoriously lost Spider-Pit sequence!

Despite all these distractions, Kyser proves up to the task as he tinkers with the controls and realizes everything they saw earlier in the ballroom was remote controlled. He also finds some vital papers; but as he reads, Kyser hears someone coming, stuffs those papers into his pajamas, and hides just as Saliano enters the room.

But he isn’t there long when an intercom buzzes and he’s ordered to come to somebody's room. When he leaves, Kyser sneaks out behind him. And with this mystery plot almost resolved, all our hero has to do now is discover who that was Saliano talked to.

Well, since we already know, we watch as our three conspirators meet. Realizing their time is running out, Mainwaring has one last ditch idea to bump off Janis and still make it look like an accident. But to do this, Saliano will have to hold yet another séance. The other two are doubtful they can do this without raising suspicions, but Mainwaring says not to worry because Aunt Margo will be the one demanding it. With that, Saliano knows what to do and leaves. Tired of being outwitted by morons, Fenninger warns if this latest plan doesn't work, he'll just use his gun and get it over with.

Entering his secret lair, Saliano flips a few switches and places two microphones near his throat that distorts his voice. Pumping this ghostly Sonovox sound into Aunt Margo's bedroom, while pretending to be Elmer, he demands that Margo gather everyone together because her late brother has something important to reveal to Janis.

Soon after, everyone else is woken up and herded into the ballroom -- except for Janis and Ginny, whom Chuck and Kyser want safely locked-up in their room with Ish and Sully on guard. Relatively certain Saliano and Mainwaring are behind these attacks, Kyser then makes the mistake of taking Fenninger into his confidence and reveals their plan to take the two bad guys down.

Thus, using another secret passage to gain entrance into their locked bedroom, a tipped-off Mainwaring attempts to chop Janis' head off with a large scimitar while she sleeps. But Ish wakes up in time to foil this. However, the attack wasn’t a total loss as Janis is now out of the bedroom and will be present for the deadly, and final, séance.

Thus and so, when everyone is present and accounted for, Kyser kicks up some spooky mood music as Saliano enters his tent. In the dark, the bandleader manages to hand off the glowing baton to a decoy and sneaks off to that secret passage he used early to enter Saliano's lair.

And as the séance proper commences, while everyone is transfixed on the ghostly head of Elmer Bellacrest, Fenninger quietly positions one of Saliano's deadly electronic devices behind Janis' chair -- and when he plugs the contraption back in, it will arc across to the one near the tent, frying poor Janis to a cinder.

But down below, Kyser manages to knock out Saliano and takes over the broadcast, warning everyone to get moving 'cuz there's a murderer in their midst. Pandemonium ensues, and Janis bails before the machine can spark off. And when Chuck hits the lights, revealing that Mainwaring was wearing the glowing mask all along, the dastardly villain pulls a gun and manages to duck away into yet another secret passage.

Entering the control room, Mainwaring starts duking it out with Kyser; and while the men fight below, they trigger all of the equipment, causing all kinds of hell to break loose in the ballroom up above them. Landing a lucky punch, Kyser then escapes up through a trapdoor and into Saliano's tent. Unfortunately, everyone mistakes him for the killer and tackles the tent en masse.

Waving his trademark glasses as a white flag, after they all untangle themselves, Kyser reveals who the killers were and the motive behind it all by showing Janis the papers he found: a codicil to her father's will that states when she turns 21, she becomes the sole executor of her father's fortune. Seems Mainwaring, through Saliano, had been bilking money from Aunt Margo for a long time and knew Janis would put a stop to this; and so, the girl had to go.

Meantime, Fenninger, whose treachery still hasn't been discovered, offers to go and hold the criminals with his pistol until the authorities arrive. But after he's gone, there's a knock on the window, which leads them to a battered and bruised figure, who claims to be the real Fenninger!

Realizing they've been duped too late, the fake Fenninger, Mainwaring and Saliano return with pistols drawn. Saliano also holds a bundle of dynamite (-- a similar batch took out the bridge, I’d wager). Here, Fenninger announces these daffy interlopers may have spoiled their plans but the crooks will have the last laugh, and get away with it all, by blowing up the house. And once the police get done sifting for bodies, they'll be long gone.

With that, the fuse is lit, the dynamite is tossed, and the criminals escape -- locking everyone else inside the ballroom. (Did I mention the windows were all barred?) Wanting to play fetch, a confused Prince grabs the dynamite but Kay wrestles it out of the dog’s jaws and tosses it out the window. Still confused, the dog bounds after the bundle, retrieves it, and starts to bring it back -- until spotting the fleeing criminals and chases after them instead.

As Ish calls for his pup to drop the dynamite before it's too late, Prince disappears into the bushes. And after the inevitable explosion, Ish is inconsolable. But as Kay promises to build a shrine for the dog, they hear Prince happily barking and look outside to see he's alive and kicking, and chewing on what's left of Saliano's turban.

And that about wraps up the movie except for one final closing number, where Kyser incorporates Saliano's Sonovox equipment to "Give voice to the instruments." And then one more curtain call by Kyser, but he's quickly disintegrated by Saliano's death-spheres before he can finish.

You know, this movie has taken way too much grief over forcing three horror icons into all that corniness. And You’ll Find Out is one big can of corn -- straight off the cob. But as Kyser would say, "Pop that corn, baby!" And if you give the film a chance, Kyser and the gang visibly improve as things progress; and by the start of the third act he had successfully ingratiated himself to me, which was a nice reward for sticking through that spastic opening act. Of course, I'm a sucker for any kind of big old haunted house movies -- and the more secret passages the better -- no matter who’s involved.

And no doubt about it, RKO Pictures scored themselves a helluva coup by landing Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorre in the same picture -- especially when you consider Universal hadn’t really started there Monster Rallies of the 1940s yet, starting with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). Karloff was pretty much done playing Frankenstein and Universal at this point but is rock solid, as always, if not underused. At the same time, Lorre's stock was on the rise. Mr. Moto was behind him, and a career of getting pushed around by Humphrey Bogart was right around the corner.

And as I mentioned in my review of One Body Too Many (1945), it does the heart good to see Lugosi at least a little healthier and not embarrass himself. There's a great scene where he gets really excited during one of Ginny Simm's numbers, where he's smitten with the girl and really gets into the beat.

After this, Lugosi had a few more supporting bits for the majors but was already on a slippery slope to Poverty Row, where Sam Katzman and Ed Wood were waiting. But of the three, Lorre was the one who steals the show as he constantly gets the upper hand and the last word with our bumbling hero.

And would you believe -- according to a growing legend, at least, that these three were supposed to have their own musical number together? Allegedly, it was supposed to be a derivative of Ish Kabbible's "The Bad Humor Man" twisted into something along the lines of "We're the Three Bad Humored Men." Truth or bull-twaddle? Who knows, but when the legend is more entertaining than the truth, print the legend, Boils and Ghouls.

A survivor of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, David Butler, the film's producer, writer and director broke into show business in the silents around 1910 as a bit player and extra, appearing in films by D.W. Griffith -- Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Tod Browning -- The Unpainted Woman (1919), The Wise Kid (1922), and John Ford -- The Village Blacksmith (1922), Hoodman Blind (1923) before moving to directing in 1927 with High School Hero (1927).

Showing a knack for light comedies and musicals, Butler developed a solid reputation and would work with the likes of Will Rogers -- A Connecticut Yankee (1931), Business and Pleasure (1932), and Shirley Temple -- Bright Eyes (1934), The Little Colonel (1935), as well as the barn-burning pre-code musical, Sunny Side Up (1929).

When the 1940s rolled around, Butler split time between directing for Kyser and Bob Hope -- Caught in the Draft (1941), They Got Me Covered (1942), which is one of my favorite Hope movies, as well as tackling Hope and Bing Crosby’s third Road Picture, The Road to Morocco (1942). And later in the 1950s, he took up with Doris Day for another string of successful musicals -- Tea for Two (1950), Lullaby of Broadway (1951), Calamity Jane (1953).

Here, for You'll Find Out, the musical numbers were handled well enough but with everything else Butler seemed content to just set back and not get in anybody’s way when it came to the mystery and mayhem.

Also of note, contributing screenwriter James Kern would go on to work for another radio star, Jack Benny, and wrote the oddity to end all oddities for his new boss, The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945), where Benny was an Archangel sent down from heaven to blow his horn -- sounding the beginning of Armageddon! Jack, of course, loses the trumpet. Mayhem ensues.

Circling back to Kyser, it's kind of amazing that -- for as popular as he was during his reign, Kyser and his band is all but forgotten today. He made four more follow-up features -- the best being My Favorite Spy (1942), and his film career officially ended with Carolina Blues (1945). When the United States entered World War II, while Kyser lost several band members to the draft, he was also one of the first entertainers to perform for the troops and was instrumental in setting up the Hollywood Canteen. He also scored one of his biggest hits with a cover of Frank Loesser’s "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.”

And it was while performing a tour in the Pacific Theater that Kyser made the conscious decision that he would no longer play for money. He was financially set anyway, but seeing the sacrifice the soldiers were making tempered Kyser and his patented style changed drastically, almost overnight. And on top of that, crippling arthritis, personnel changes, and a tragic bus fire that consumed most of their arrangements all contributed to Kyser's abrupt retirement from the public-eye in 1950. And with his wife, singer Georgia Carroll, Kyser retired back to North Carolina and devoted all of his energies toward his faith as a Christian Scientist. He would pass away in relative anonymity in 1985 at the age of 80.

Thus, on top of the three bogeymen, You'll Find Out also serves as a nice time capsule for Kyser, his band, and his style of music, which is pretty damned catchy. It was a different era and a different kind of sound, sure. I get that. But some people just can't get past this fact. Whatever. I just don't think the movie is all that bad. In fact, the more I find out about You'll Find Out, the more and more I dig it.

Well, if you don't know what Hubrisween is by now, Boils and Ghouls, I don't think I can help you. Anyhoo, that's 25 films down with only one, ONE, more left to go. Up next, Ah, shit. We're back in Zombie sequel territory again. AGAIN!

You’ll Find Out (1940) RKO-Radio Pictures / P: David Butler / D: David Butler / W: James V. Kern, David Butler / C: Frank Redman / E: Irene Morra / M: Roy Webb, George Dunning, Johnny Mercer, / S: Kay Kyser, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Helen Parrish, Dennis O’Keefe, Ginny Simms, Harry Babbitt, Sully Mason, Ish Kabibble

Hubrisween 2020 :: X is for the Crosshairs in Targets (1968)

2020-10-29T02:51:00.002-05:00

Bedeviled ravens are screeching, a storm is raging, and an elderly man moves through a castle as our latest feature begins already in earnest. Apparently on a mission, this man, The Baron, will stop at nothing as he makes his way through the cobwebs, down some steps, and into the family crypt, knocking away his butler as he approaches the sarcophagus holding the remains of his late wife.

But when the old man pries the lid off, both he is shocked and we are shocked to discover these contents we’ve been watching were nothing more than a screening of the final cut of Sammy Michaels’ The Terror (playing itself), the latest in a string of low-budget B-pictures starring the reigning King of the Boogeymen, Mr. Byron Orlok.

But neither the star nor the director seemed all that thrilled with what’s playing out as they huddle together in the darkened screening room; in fact, one could almost sense they are embarrassed by it as the overwrought climax plays out. But their producer, Marshall Smith (Landis), is ecstatic.

And so ecstatic is he, Smith announces that he will finance Michaels’ next script, which he claims is a work of art and a real change of pace from the usual schlock his studio craps out, which will also star Orlok as the headliner.

Only Orlok (Karloff) picks that moment to make a surprise announcement: he will not be making anymore pictures, and from this moment forward he has officially retired. Smith, of course, goes apoplectic over this, kicks everyone out except for Orlok, and then starts tearing into the old actor over this act of ingratitude, saying he’s kept him alive these past few years when no one else would hire him.

Meanwhile, out in the hall, Michaels (Bogdanovich), is also wigging out a bit due to Orlok’s decision to suddenly retire from pictures rather than do his new script. And on top of that, his girlfriend, Jenny (Hsueh), is also Orlok’s personal assistant, who must now decide who to remain with when the dust settles and her boss moves back home to England. Then, Orlok storms past them and leaves the building.

Told his next picture just walked out the door unless he does something about it, Michaels catches up to Orlok and pleads his case. But Orlok is adamant. And even though he is assured this new script was expressly written for him and is “not that kind of picture,” the veteran actor feels he is too antiquated, an anachronism, a punchline even, and it’s time to make way for somebody else because he simply just isn't that scary anymore.

Meantime, across the street at the Brass Rail Gun Shop, a young man named Bobby Thompson (O’Kelly) is getting a feel for the hunting rifle he is about to purchase, training the scope and drawing a bead on the old man across the street. When the star-struck clerk points out it was Byron Orlok, Thompson hadn’t even noticed.

With his honest face, Thompson is allowed to write a check for the rifle and several boxes of ammunition. He then deposits all of this into the trunk of his Mustang, where we see this man has accumulated quite the arsenal, whose purpose the film is not quite ready to reveal just yet as he heads for home, passing the Reseda Drive-In along the way, whose marquee promises a personal appearance by Byron Orlok for the world premiere of The Terror.

When Bobby reaches his destination and enters a suburban house, which is a sensory deprivation shade of blue, antiseptic and sterile, we quickly suss out this is the home of his parents, where he lives with his wife, Ilene (Morgan), in a subservient existence under his domineering father, Robert (Brown), who is Sir, not dad, and an emasculating mother, Charlotte (Jackson). Both mean well, and neither is malevolent -- just smothering.

Here, our lingering suspicions of this man are confirmed a bit by a (less than subtle) commercial for Anatomy of a Murder (1959) playing on the TV as he enters, and how detached Bobby is from these people and his surroundings as he silently moves through them; and when you combine all of that with all of those guns, all kinds of red flares start going off as the family gathers around the table for an evening meal that a fraying mental fuse has already been lit.

And this fuse is still burning when he and his father get in a little post-meal target practice. For, as the old man moves to set up the perforated cans for another round, Bobby draws a bead on him, and nearly pulls the trigger on his unwitting target before his father finishes up and then catches him in this deliberate breach of safety protocols and scolds him like he's a 10-year old.

Meanwhile, Orlok and Jenny are out having a drink at the Polo Lounge to celebrate his recent liberation. When asked why he refused to make her boyfriend’s next picture, Orlok is sympathetic to Michaels’ plight but admits he never even read the script. They are then ambushed by Ed Loughlin (Peterson), Smith’s press agent, there to go over the details about that pending personal appearance at the Drive-In.

Again, a cranky Orlok refuses to participate and backs out, even though he will most likely be sued over breach of contract. And when Loughlin puts in a call to break the bad news to Smith, who says he will be letting his fans down, Orlok refuses to even speak to him, telling Loughlin to tell Smith if he is so interested in the welfare of the people he should stop making pictures before hanging up on him. Realizing he will likely be fired over this cock-up, Loughlin, an innocent bystander in all of this, has a bit of a mental meltdown before leaving to go and get hopelessly drunk.

Later, at his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Jenny accuses a now tipsy Orlok of pushing everyone who cares about him away in a fit of unflattering self-pity. He then picks a fight with her, reminding Jenny that she is merely an employee, which earns him a slammed door in his face before he can apologize, leaving him all alone with his guilty conscience.

Meantime, at the Thompson house, Ilene is getting ready for work -- a late shift as a telephone operator. Here, we reach a crucible moment when Bobby tries to reach out to her, needing to talk about the “funny ideas” he’s been having lately. But while Ilene is listening, she doesn’t really hear what her husband is saying; and not realizing the gravity of the situation only makes things worse with some harmless but patronizing platitudes and this moment of a possible de-escalation is lost.

And after she leaves, Bobby retrieves a .45 caliber pistol from his trunk arsenal and sneaks it into the house.

Back at the hotel, Orlok is nursing another drink as he watches one of his old films on the TV when there is a rap on his chamber door. It’s Michaels, who is also three sheets to the wind and looking for his script.

He is also drawn to the TV, noting how he first saw this Orlok picture, The Criminal Code (playing itself), at the Museum of Modern Art, and how “all the good pictures have been made.” Orlok agrees, saying he and the film both belong in a museum.

With that, Michaels loses his temper and would like some answers, wanting to know why the actor won’t be in his film in a part that will show people who he really is: a human being, not some spookshow huckster. How it took months to convince Smith to back it. And how Orlok sat through three lousy, stinking pictures and now that they were going to make a good one, he quits. Why?

Here, Orlok admits he never read the script and then gets a bit philosophical, saying everyone he knew in the business was already dead. He’s a dinosaur, out-moded. Mr. Boogey-Man, they called him. The King of Blood. The Marx Brothers made you laugh, Garbo made you weep, and Orlok made you scream. And now, he is considered pure camp. The films didn’t get bad, he contends. No. He got bad. Besides, he says, tossing a newspaper at Michaels, whose headlines scream of a mass-shooting at a supermarket, people have a new kind of monster to be scared of. The King of Horror is dead, long live the King.

Seeing his cause is lost, Michaels takes his script and leaves, saying he’s going to make the movie anyway and will offer the role to Vincent Price instead. At least that’s the plan, until he realizes he’s too drunk and his legs will no longer cooperate. And when Orlok tries to help him to the couch, Michaels keeps on moving into the bedroom and collapses on the bed. Here, Orlok realizes he’s as drunk as his friend, and summarily passes out right next to him.

Later that night, at the Thompson house, Bobby is also in bed, chain-smoking away, until his wife comes home. Told to leave the lights off because he has a terrible headache -- but this is really so she can’t see the gun on the nightstand. And so, Ilene changes in the dark and then crawls into bed beside him.

And even though it was a long shift, she’s ready to talk about his earlier concerns; but it’s late -- too late, and he says to just go to sleep and they’ll talk in the morning.

Come the dawn, Bobby is up and pounding the keys on a typewriter, spelling out D-I-E period.

When his curious wife comes into the room to see what he had been typing -- not realizing Bobby has grabbed the pistol, she strolls on over for a morning kiss only to be abruptly shot at point blank range by her husband.

And when his mother rushes in to see what happened, she is shot next. Realizing someone else is in the house, Bobby rushes to the kitchen, where a delivery boy tries to get away but is also shot dead.

Then, once this massacre is complete, Bobby carefully moves his wife into their bedroom, lays her out in state, and then buries her under a blanket. His mother is treated a little more roughly as she is dragged into her bedroom and then unceremoniously dumped on his parent’s bed.

And after the delivery boy’s body is secreted in the pantry, Bobby then meticulously cleans up the crime scene, covering up all the blood evidence. We then hear his car start up and roar away as the camera lingers behind, taking in the aftermath, before settling on the typewriter to reveal the entirety of Bobby’s manifesto, which shows this was merely the beginning and a lot more killing was yet to come...

After heading down to Puerto Rico to make one movie, Battle of Blood Island (1960), for his fledgling production company, Filmgroup, Roger Corman, always thrifty and one to maximize or recycle his and other people’s sets or locations, managed to come back with three, by shooting both Last Woman on Earth (1960), which was sort of planned, and Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961), which was not and came about solely because Corman realized he had enough film stock and short-ends leftover to get one more picture in the can by cannibalizing a script he’d already made twice -- as Naked Paradise (1957) and Beast from Haunted Cave (1959), on, essentially, someone else’s dime.

But when filming was completed Corman's tropical misadventures were far from over. Seems veteran cinematographer Jacques Marquette -- The Brain from Planet Arous (1957), Attack of the 50ft Woman (1958), had refused to stay in Corman's impromptu barracks and opted, instead, for the local Hilton, where he would invite other cast and crew members to eat and charged it all to his producer.

What happened next, according to Marquette, and corroborated by actor Betsy Jones-Moreland, who starred in two of those pictures, when the shooting wrapped it appeared Corman was ready to sneak out of the country and skip out on the bills; basically stranding the rest of the cast and crew, who weren't paid yet, leaving them with no means to get home. Not one to be screwed with, Marquette seized and hid several rolls of film for all three pictures and did not return them until all the bills were paid and all the cast and crew's checks cleared.

Upon his return to the States, Corman was next slated to direct another horror double-feature for Jim Nicholson and Sam Arkoff at American International, scheduled to be shot back to back, in black and white, with a budget of $100,000 each. Now, as I mentioned in my review of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the release of that film, with its blazing technicolor, free-flowing blood and tensile cleavage, served as a paradigm shift in cinematic horror movies. And in an effort to keep up, Corman, realizing these old double-bills weren’t going to cut the cheese anymore, managed to convince the brass at AIP to combine those budgets and make one color feature instead.

The result of these efforts, with a little help from screenwriter Richard Matheson, production designer Daniel Haller, and star Vincent Price, was House of Usher (1960), adapted from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. And this gamble paid off big time as the film and its lofty Gothic ambitions defied the odds and proved a box-office hit, even earning some critical praise, as a franchise was soon born to cash-in on what would come to be known as Corman’s Poe Cycle.

But after doing The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and the anthology film Tales of Terror (1962) for AIP, which were based on Poe’s short stories, Corman attempted to do The Premature Burial (1962) on his own. With financing secured from Pathe Labs, a film developing firm looking to get into production, and star Ray Milland replacing Price, who was under an exclusive contract with AIP, everything seemed set to go until Sam Arkoff got wind of it, and then strong-armed Pathe into relinquishing their interest. Thus, The Premature Burial was suddenly another AIP Poe production; a move that Corman didn’t really appreciate and kind of lit a slow-fuse on the eventual and inevitable break-up between him and the production company that mutually put each other on the cinematic map back in the early 1950s.

This was all compounded a bit further in 1963, where Corman had both The Raven (1963), another Poe picture -- only this one was a comedy, and a straight adaptation of H.P Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward on the slate -- a much needed change of pace from Poe, giving himself a bit of a breather.

But the brass at AIP were so Poe-addled at this juncture they rebranded the film, against Corman’s wishes, as The Haunted Palace (1963); a title sniped from another Poe poem; even adding several narrated lines from this to open the film as a kind of forced-fit framing device on their Lovecraft adaptation.

This wasn't’ unprecedented as they had pulled this same stunt on Corman before, turning his Prehistoric World into Teenage Caveman (1958) to ride on the coattails of the wildly successful I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957).

We also need to point out that about four years earlier, Corman found out another production had finished shooting but their office sets were still standing. And after finagling a deal to use them for two days, he and his stock screenwriter, Chuck Griffith, went bar-hopping, got drunk, got in a fight, and cooked up an idea where a nebbish clerk fed his customers to a man-eating plant, resulting in the quickest, cheapest, and most threadbare Corman production to date, The Little Shop of Horrors (1960).

Now, bear all of this wheeling and dealing and behind the scenes dickering in mind as Corman was closing in on wrapping up The Raven. With one week of shooting left to go, before they broke for the weekend, Corman complimented Haller once again on his fantastic production design and the amazing castle set he slapped together with the loose change found in Arkoff’s couch cushions, with both lamenting how it would all have to be torn down at the end of next week, marking the (at the time presumed) end of the Poe cycle.

On the subsequent Sunday, Corman’s scheduled tennis match got rained out, giving him a hole in his schedule and enough time to scheme and cement an idea for another whirlwind, two-day feature. He’d done it before. Could he do it again? "I was getting so familiar with the standard elements of Poe's material that I tried to out-Poe himself and create a Gothic tale from scratch,” said Corman in his auto-biography, How I Made 100 Films in Hollywood But Never Lost a Dime. And not only that, but to once again complete the majority of principal photography on said film in just two shooting days, using The Raven's castle set on the sly before they tore it all down.

In retrospect, Corman said he undertook this nigh impossible task for the mere challenge of it, but I have a feeling at least part of the reasoning was to pull one over on AIP and make another movie for himself -- this time on Arkoff’s dime. Now all he needed was a script. And for that, Corman called up Leo Gordon and asked if he had anything with a castle in it for sale. He didn’t, so Corman invited him over for a brainstorming session to get the ball rolling on a new script that needed to be completed in less than a week.

Now, Gordon was an actor, a screenwriter, and a convicted felon, who had served five years in San Quentin for armed robbery, when he tried to stick-up a bar and got shot several times by the police while being apprehended. After his sentence played out, he took up acting as a profession; and with his hulking frame and brutish demeanor, Gordon set off on a nearly 40-year career as a Hollywood tough guy and heavy, where he infamously backed-down John Wayne during the production of Hondo (1953), when his character was shot on screen during the climax and pitched forward, causing Wayne to step on director John Farrow’s toes, called for a cut, and then started lecturing Gordon on how people fell backwards when they’re shot at point blank rage. To which Gordon pulled-up his shirt, showed off his scars, and said when he got shot getting those, he pitched forward. End of discussion.

Gordon turned to screenwriting in 1956, first for television, and then wrote his first feature for Corman two years later, Hot Car Girl (1958). He then followed that up with The Cry Baby Killer (1958), The Wasp Woman (1959), and Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959). And now, he was tasked with coming up with something for The Terror (1963) after he and Corman hashed-out a few details on that rainy Sunday: the gist of the story would revolve around a young officer in Napoleon's Army, lost along the Baltic coast, who winds up pursuing a mysterious woman to the castle of the elderly Baron Von Leppe, who claims the woman was nothing more than the spirit of his long dead wife, and then supernatural shenanigans takeover from there.

What that all entailed was up to Gordon, as long as he had it done by next Monday. And Corman’s only demand was that the climax involve the castle being destroyed in a flash flood instead of the usual cleansing fires of his other Poe pictures. “I just can’t burn another castle down,” said Corman.

As for the cast, well, turns out the sets and crew wouldn’t be the only thing pilfered from The Raven. First up, for the Baron, he got Boris Karloff to stick around for two more days of shooting for a percentage of the new film’s profits, plus a deferred bonus of $15,000 if the film went on to make over $150,000 at the box-office.

In a later interview, Karloff commented on the filming of The Terror, saying, “Corman had the sketchiest outline of a story. I read it and begged him not to do it … I was in every shot, of course. Sometimes I was just walking through and then I would change my jacket and walk back.”

And for the film’s theoretical but harrowing climax, Karloff added, “[Corman] nearly killed me on the last day. He had me in a tank of cold water for about two hours.” Still, the actor had few regrets about the film or its harried production. “The sets were so magnificent. And as they were being pulled down around our ears, Roger was dashing around with me and a camera, two steps ahead of the wreckers. It was very funny.”

Corman heldover Jack Nicholson from The Raven, too, as Lt. Andre Duvalier, who suggested using his then-wife, Sandra Knight, to play Helene, who may or may not be the ghost of Baroness Ilsa Von Leppe. And then the rest of the small cast was rounded out by several of Corman’s stock players with Dick Miller as the faithful butler, Jonathan Haze as a local peasant who knows too much, and Dorothy Neumann as the witch, who holds the key to this unfolding, not quite yet written, and very confusing mystery.

Yeah, as dear Boris said, when shooting began, the script for The Terror was far from complete at this point, basically a vague outline. And as the two day shoot drew to a close, pressed for time, Corman didn’t even slate his shots anymore and just kept the camera rolling as his cast of characters moved down hallways, went up and down a staircase, had several circular conversations, or opened and closed a bunch of doors.

The end goal was to get whatever he could during those two days, finish up with Karloff, and then shelve the footage until the script could be solidified, and then finish filming piecemeal on some other set -- most likely the forthcoming The Haunted Palace, plug that into the original footage and, ta-dah, The Terror would be complete. A good plan, and a solid plan, that was about to go completely awry.

See, from there, the film was shelved for about three months as Gordon finished up the script at long last, which Corman paid him about $1600 for. But by then, Corman was gearing up to head to Europe to follow the Grand Prix around and film The Young Racers (1963); and so, to save money he decided to shoot the rest of The Terror non-union. And to those ends, he charged his newest assistant, Francis Ford Coppola, to assemble a crew of college students from UCLA and USC, including Jack HIll and Gary Kurtz, and sent them off to Big Sur for a couple of days with Nicholson, Knight, and Haze to get some needed scenes along the beaches and cliffs there.

But once they reached their destination, Coppola got it into his head to rewrite the script and “improve” the story, giving him the excuse to shoot whatever the hell he wanted to. And then, eleven days later, after he almost drowned his leading man in the surf, he returned and cut his footage together only to find out he'd neglected to tell his cameraman that some of those scenes needed to be shot day for night, rendering the majority of his efforts useless because it did not match the original footage at all, and his changes to the narrative made a jumbled and already confusing plot nearly intractable.

All told, after all that time and effort, about ten minutes of Coppola’s footage made it into the finished picture. “It didn’t exactly mesh with what I had shot,” said Corman. “But it still looked pretty good.” Also, the film was still nowhere near being completed.

Meanwhile, more time passed as Corman worked to patch up The Terror a little at a time. Needing some second-unit footage of rushing and cascading water to enhance his soggy climax, Corman needed someone to make a quick trip to Hoover Dam. By now, Coppola had moved on to bigger pastures but recommended fellow UCLA student, Dennis Jakob, who took the assignment but then essentially disappeared for three days. And when he finally came back, Corman quickly sussed out he had been played, and Jakob had used his equipment to shoot his thesis film on top of the ten-minutes it took to get the gushing water.

Annoyed initially, Corman soon realized Jakob basically did to him as he so often had done to many others and let this slide. In fact, he was a little proud of him. Besides, he would later press him into service as Karloff’s double as he tried to shore up the climax for a film that still wasn’t finished and still didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Of course, Jakob looked as much like Karloff as Kathy Wood’s chiropractor resembled Bela Lugosi in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). But, enh, what are ya gonna do?

More time passed, and in an effort to salvage things Corman next turned to Monte Hellman, who had directed Beast from Haunted Cave, and Jack Hill, who was charged with rewriting the script to try and match-up all that jumbled footage that had already been expended on The Terror. And what couldn’t be fixed, Hellman would then shoot more footage to help bridge those gaps. Here, Hill basically changed the tenor of the entire movie with a big twist that I won’t spoil in case anyone is actually intrigued enough to see what this all looked like when The Terror was finally finished -- which it still wasn’t.

See, Hellman shot for five days before having to leave due to prior commitments on Back Door to Hell (1963), which meant Hill got promoted to the director’s chair. By now, Knight was pregnant and showing -- and the rumor was her and Nicholson’s baby was conceived during the shoot at Big Sur to give you some scope of how much time had passed since filming began on this magnum opus, explaining why some of her scenes were shot from the waist-up only, and how everyone’s hair doesn’t match-up from scene to scene. And sharp eyes will note, sure enough, several scenes were indeed shot on the sets of The Haunted Palace, including the stairway to the vault and the massive gnarled tree, where Vincent Price’s character was burned alive, for the film’s final twist.

When Hill slapped it all together, and re-dubbed a lot of the dialogue to make it work, lip-syncing be damned, Corman screened the rough-cut of this patchwork Frankenstein’s Monster of a film. It still didn’t make any sense, but he felt it was almost to the point of being releasable with just a few more tweaks. Said Corman, “There were some gaps in logic; and frankly it struck me as a little dull.”

And so, Corman once more settled into the director’s chair for one more day of shooting, brought in Nicholson and Dick Miller for a scene where Nicholson’s character, through threat of violence, demands Miller’s character to literally explain the overcooked plot and reveal just what in the hell was going on in this movie. And then he threw Miller, Nicholson, Jakob and a stand-in for Knight into the water and blasted them with a fire hose to punch-up the climax, which finally wrapped The Terror at long last.

All told it took nine months, two days, and four directors to complete The Terror. (Almost five directors as Nicholson claimed since everybody else in the whole damned town had a hand in this picture, he should’ve had a shot at it, too.) In the interim, Coppola had made a whole other picture for Corman, Dementia 13 (1963), which was released on a double bill with The Terror for Arkoff and American International, who had kind of sniffed out what Corman was up to during the wrap party for The Raven, when he noticed the sets were still standing.

Suspicious, he returned the following Monday and, sure enough, “He was shooting another [expletive deleted] picture on us.” Caught in the act, all Corman could do was shrug. At this point, Arkoff let it go, figuring AIP would most likely release the film whenever it was finished. And it was finished, finally, but Corman still wasn’t done tinkering with this damnable film, and tried to squeeze a little more money out of it’s corpse.

Remember how Karloff had been promised a deferred bonus on The Terror if it made more than $150,000? Well, after cooking the books to prove that it never reached that threshold, Karloff’s agent saw through this and demanded the bonus due his client. And after a little back and forth, Corman agreed to pay the money on the condition Karloff gave him two more days on a future film. The idea, and stop me if you’ve heard this one before, was to take 20-minutes of existing footage from The Terror, and then combine that with 20-more minutes of new Karloff footage, plus 40-minutes with some other actors and, ta-dah, another cheap Karloff picture to release. And to pull this off, Corman turned to his latest assistant, Peter Bogdanovich.

Bogdanovich was an actor, a director for the stage, and was a huge movie buff along with his wife and partner, Polly Platt, who had recently gotten a job at Esquire Magazine and moved to California, where he wrote about the movies and interviewed legendary directors ranging from John Ford to Howard Hawks to Alfred Hitchcock to Orson Welles among many others. He met Corman by chance at a screening, who admired his writing and asked if he’d like to come work for him and make some movies. Bogdanovich jumped at the chance.

His first assignment was to write something on the scale of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) or Lawrence of Arabia (1962) that could be filmed on a Corman budget. And while that wound up going nowhere fast, his second assignment was to consult on a script for a proposed feature called All the Fallen Angels. This, of course, later turned into The Wild Angels (1966), Corman’s first Outlaw Biker movie, where Bogdanovich scouted locations, advised on the casting, rewrote most of Chuck Griffith’s script, shot both first and second unit, was called on to edit his footage when no one else could make it work, and was pressed into duty as an extra during the climactic brawl, where he got the living shit kicked out of him by several members of the cast of real Hell’s Angels.

Bogdanovich would later claim the three weeks he spent on this shoot was “the greatest film school anybody could ever put me through. You were doing it, you were under pressure, you had to deliver.”

His third assignment for Corman was to cannibalize the special-effect sequences from a couple of Russian science-fiction epics, Nebo Zovyot -- The Sky Calls (1959) and Planeta Bur --The Planet of Storms (1962), and make another picture out of them as Coppola had done before with Battle Beyond the Sun (1962). But the footage had no women, and so Corman instructed Bogdanovich to head to Leo Carrillo beach with Mamie Van Doran, feeling it would match the Baltic Sea footage as a good substitute for the planet Venus.

“I hired the Gill-Woman of Venus -- just a bunch of stoned kids walking around the beach dressed like mermaids, with seashells covering their breasts,” said Bogdanovich. “Tackiest @#%*ing costumes I have ever seen. And now they were praying to a pterodactyl or something and communicating telepathically with Van Doren.” The end results of all of this was Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968); and, like Coppola, Bogdanovich distanced himself from the awful picture by using an alias in the credits, Derek Thomas. “It was hell.”

And then his fourth assignment would be the new Karloff vehicle, where he would finally get to write and direct something essentially from scratch -- except for being saddled with footage from The Terror, which he had no idea how to incorporate into this new film as he and Platt tried to come up with a through story-line. But then things started to finally click together when they actually screened The Terror and Bogdanovich declared it an abomination upon its conclusion. Here, came the notion to just make it a film within a film, where Karloff would watch the ending of The Terror and then declare it was the worst film he had ever seen as a jumping-off point for the new picture.

From there, it would sort of get a little meta as Karloff would play an aging horror star in the twilight of his career. And to contrast “the illusion of horror” of Karloff’s Gothic cinematic trappings with the “real horror” of unmotivated murder, Bogdanovich and Platt then hit upon the idea that Karloff’s character was fed up and would announce his retirement, feeling he was a dinosaur about to go extinct with the meteoric impact of the true life, ripped from the headlines terror unleashed by people like Charles Whitman, who, back in August of 1966, started shooting from the observation deck of the University Tower in Austin, Texas. Ninety-six minutes later, twelve people were dead and countless others wounded.

Also killed prior to the rampage were Whitman's wife and mother. And Whitman was dead, too; dropped in a hail of gunfire, bringing his reign of terror to an end. As to why he did it, some would argue it was to get back at his abusive father -- and that’s one of the reasons he killed his wife and mother, so only his father would answer for his son’s crimes. Or was it because he was strung out on amphetamines? Or was it an overwhelming feeling of failure and inadequacy, or perhaps some deep-seeded narcissistic tendencies drove him to do something so drastic, so heinous, that everyone would know and remember his name in perpetuity.

It was Harold Hayes, his old editor at Esquire, who suggested using Whitman as the counterpoint to Karloff; and so, Bogdanovich would split his film in two, which would then intertwine until finally colliding at the climax of Targets (1968). Here, Bobby Thompson would be his surrogate for Whitman, whose stifling home lives echo each other. And like Whitman, Bobby would wait until his father was gone before murdering his wife and mother.

And he would echo Whitman again when he hits up another gun store and buys an obscene amount of ammunition and charges it all to his father’s account. When asked what he's hunting for with all those bullets, Thompson says he’s “Gonna shoot some pigs” -- just as Whitman said on his own ammo run that fateful and terrible day.

Meantime, in the other narrative thread, as the clock strikes noon, there’s finally some movement between the extremely hungover Michaels and Orlok, who manage to comically pry themselves out of bed. Then, Jenny bursts in, still upset as she angrily lays out Orlok’s travel itinerary for his return trip to England. But the somewhat humbled and apologetic Orlok says to put all of that on hold for now, because he’s decided to make that personal appearance at the Drive-In after all. And as Jenny happily works the phones to give Loughlin the good news, he gets Michaels to stick around to help him prepare for the coming festivities.

Now, this includes a Q and A with a flaky L.A. disc jockey named Kip Larkin (Baron), who arrives at the hotel for a dress rehearsal. But when the questions veer into what film he’s doing next, Orlok quickly loses interest, saying this is all deadly dull; and since this will be his last appearance, Michaels suggests he tells a spooky ghost story instead. Orlok then relates a parable about a man’s failed attempt to escape the grim reaper, and how one’s death is both predestined and unavoidable no matter how hard we try to run away and hide from it -- foreshadowing the climax as our two plot threads are about to collide in a deadly showdown.

Meantime, near the freeway, Bobby has attained a perch atop a large storage tank at a refinery, where he pulls his arsenal out of his massive duffel-bag and meticulously lays them out in order.

And after a brief respite for a bite to eat and a bottle of Pepsi, he stretches out and trains one of those rifles on the passing motorists until he finally picks a target, takes a breath, holds it, and then squeezes the trigger, hitting the driver, and sending the car careening off the road. Then he picks another target, fires, and then another. And then another.

And this killing spree continues until he is interrupted by a maintenance worker, who is cut in half by a shotgun blast. But before he can turn his attention back to sniping at unsuspecting motorists, Bobby hears the approach of police sirens and quickly abandons his perch, bleeding guns as he retreats back to his car.

Back on the road, he makes the mistake of running a red light, drawing the attention of a passing patrol car, who gives chase until Bobby manages to lose him by ducking his car into, you guessed it, the Reseda Drive-In, where a line is already forming for a chance to see Byron Orlok in person.

Buying a ticket, Bobby finds a parking space and starts reloading several clips for his rifle as the sun slowly sets and the staff and projectionist make preparations for the big show. Staring at the blank screen, the shooter suddenly gets an idea, takes up his duffel-bag, exits the car, and heads for a doorway at the base of the screen, which he slips through unnoticed.

Meanwhile, on the limousine ride to Reseda, Orlok comments on how ugly this town has become while Jenny notices an increased police presence as several patrol cars prowl the area, looking for the sniper. Here, Orlok wants her to know that she shouldn’t feel obligated to come to England with him if she doesn’t want to, not wanting to break-up any romances, as they reach their destination. Told to park up front by the manager (Condylis), the limousine barely gets settled before the movie starts.

But unbeknownst to all the patrons, someone is watching them, too, as Bobby has taken up another perch high on the enclosed scaffolding holding up the massive screen, which he has punched a hole through and stuck his rifle barrel out of as he scans the audience, looking for a target with this obscene eye.

And then he finds one as some unlucky soul enters a phone booth. Sharp breath. Silence. Blam.

From there, Bobby patiently waits for others to exit their cars or turn on their dome lights as the Drive-In is turned into a deadly shooting gallery. But as the bullets fly and the bodies fall, word spreads from car to car, panic ensues, and then dozens of vehicles head for the nearest escape route -- be it entrance or exit.

Thus, with traffic tied up, Michaels can't get into the Drive-In proper. Unaware of what’s going on, Orlock mocks this mass exodus, figuring it's due to the quality of the picture.

Speaking of the picture, Bobby’s next victim is the projectionist, who brushes against the volume control as he falls dead, spiking the noise levels. When someone is sent to investigate, they find the body, panic, and turn the exterior lights on, which Orlok mistakes as the cue for his appearance and moves to get out.

Meanwhile, Michaels has reached the ticket booth on foot, where the manager has received word that the projectionist is dead, meaning all that talk of a sniper was true. And as he moves to call the police, Michaels pushes through the crowd to reach Orlok and Jenny and get them out of harm's way.

Meanwhile, meanwhile, the Drive-In patrons run into some luck when the shooter slips and his bag of guns plummets to the ground, where the majority of the contents fall through a grate and out of reach.

Salvaging what he can, Bobby bursts through that same door, where he is spotted by Orlok as he fires wildly into the dwindling crowd, hitting Jenny.

And after getting her safely back into the limo, determined to put a stop to this, Orlok marches toward the gunman just as his character on screen does the same. Caught in the middle, unable to tell what’s real and what isn’t, Bobby psychotic break comes full circle as he fires wildly at both the real and unreal until Orlok reaches him and, despite being grazed in the head, beats the shooter senseless with his cane just as Michaels and the police arrive.

As he stares at this sniveling mass, who has regressed into a fetal position, a stunned Orlok asks Michaels was this pathetic and puny thing what he was so afraid of all this time? But once he’s safely in police custody, the shooter once more finds his bravado, bragging how he hardly missed a single target as he’s hustled away. Hail to the new King of Horror indeed.

Then Michaels takes Orlok back to the limo, and they leave to get Jenny to a hospital as we fade out to the following morning, where Bobby’s single abandoned car stands a lone vigil over this ersatz graveyard, where the speaker poles silently mark the graves of everyone he killed during his senseless rampage, as a shadow looms and washes over the landscape, which finally brings us to the end of this simple but effective morality play.

Boris Karloff was a bit of a late bloomer when it came to Hollywood as he was already 44-years old when Frankenstein (1931) premiered, putting the actor well into his 70s by the 1960s, where he had a bit of a revival hosting the TV-series Thriller, starred in those Corman pictures, and, of course, narrating Chuck Jones’ animated holiday staple, How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966).

He was 80-years old when filming began on Targets, and it's kind of hard to believe the man on screen in The Terror, shot just four years prior, and the actor watching it on film were the same guy.

As a wise old professor once said, it ain’t the years but the mileage. And the mileage Karloff had accrued over those years resulted in chronic rheumatoid arthritis and emphysema -- by now the actor was down to one half of one lung, requiring a wheelchair and forced oxygen between takes. Spending time in that cold water for The Terror didn’t help, nor filming in a damp, chilling fog for the Wuderlak segment in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (1963), sending the actor's already declining health into a bit of a tailspin.

He also suffered from a bad back that had required three major surgeries, which resulted from the brace he had to wear for his role in Frankenstein along with a herniated disc suffered while carrying Colin Clive around the burning windmill for the film’s climax. His legs were also shot -- his right leg was horribly deformed by this point, requiring him to wear braces and use a cane just to move around.

According to Bogdanovich, Karloff was the sweetest man who ever lived, a consummate professional, and never complained once during the harried shoot. He was also the antithesis of his character, never bitter, and was proud of his track record in creature features, saying, “The Monster was the best friend I ever had.” The two hit it off, and Karloff agreed to expand his participation past the stipulated two days to five, including a very long night at the Drive-In to get the film’s climax in the can.

But one of the true highlights of the film is Karloff reciting W. Somerset Maugham's short story, The Appointment in Samarra, which he nailed in one single take and received a standing ovation from everyone else on set for his efforts. Karloff would pass barely a year after the film was completed, starring in five more films in the interim, but he was able to see Targets before his death and declared it to be his favorite film.

As for the shooter, Corman originally suggested that Bogdanovich use Jack Nicholson in the role. But the director wasn’t all that impressed by Nicholson’s acting skills at the time and he wasn’t quite the clean-cut All-American Boy he was looking for, which he eventually found in Tim O’Kelly. Targets would be a rare feature for O’Kelly, and after a few episodic TV-credits, including being the original Danny "Book 'em Dan-O" Williams in the pilot movie for Hawaii Five-0, the actor sort of fell off the map after starring in The Grasshopper (1970).

O’Kelly brought the right kind of brash immaturity for Bobby Thompson. To the film’s betterment, Bogdanovich never really spells out why this seemingly normal boy, raised by a seemingly normal family, decided to wake up one morning and start shooting people. There are several bread crumbs lying around, including a fleeting reference that Bobby might be some kind of deranged Vietnam vet, or maybe his feelings of inadequacy (-- I’m convinced he’s lost his job but never told anyone); but Bogdanovich does not dwell on this, letting the audience draw their own conclusions; and instead focuses on what Hannah Arendt referred to as "the banality of evil." This sniper is no monster, just some raging man-child with daddy issues, who had easy access to a lot of guns and ammo.

Now, in Bogdanovich and Platt’s original screenplay, Karloff’s character was destined to die about halfway through the film since, at the time, they only had him for two days. But that was before he got extensive notes from Samuel Fuller -- Shock Corridor (1963), The Naked Kiss (1964), who basically rewrote the entire thing in three hours, pacing back and forth, smoking his customary cigar, telling Bogdanovich to write what he wanted and not what the budget dictated -- but to also save his money for the climax to make it big; and it was Fuller’s idea to shoot the climax at a Drive-In. But Fuller didn’t want to take any credit, saying if his name showed up they would think he did everything. But as a tribute to Fuller, Bogdanovich named his character after the notorious director, as Samuel Michael Fuller became Sammy Michaels, which Bogdanovich played when the original actor backed out at the last minute and to save even more money for something else.

When Corman read this script, he declared it would be the best thing he'd ever produced but was a little concerned that his novice director would get all the Karloff scenes done in just two days. But with a little cajoling, Corman agreed to pay the actor for the five days. Beyond that, there really wasn’t much of a budget figure, just an order to keep the costs as low as possible. Corman would later throw a huge shit-fit over the miniature drive-in screen that was built for the princely sum of $250, which was needed for the climax so they could use more of The Terror footage as instructed.

Behind the camera, cinematographer Lazlo Kovacs would bring a certain verisimilitude to the proceedings with his intimate set-ups, long tracking shots, and mood lighting. Kovacs had fled Hungary in 1956 with his friend and fellow cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, who both broke into the business working for Ray Dennis Steckler on The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies!!? (1964). And I’m telling ya, all that montage stuff shot at the Reseda Drive-In during the build-up to the climax is due to pure, pure Steckler influence.

From there, Kovacs would go on to shoot skin-flicks for Harry Novak -- Kiss Me Quick (1964), Wonderful World of Girls (1965), and Dave Friedman -- A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine (1966), The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (1966), before moving on to the slightly more respectable American International -- Psycho-Out (1968), The Savage Seven (1968), where he met Bogdanovich and started a long working relationship with the fledgling director, who would go on to do What's Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973) together.

Most of the outdoor action scenes were shot without sound to save money, leaving it to sound-designer Verna Fields to piece together multiple tracks to enhance the action, where she added all kinds of throwaway bits like the compressed air of a stubborn pop bottle or the jingle of an ice cream truck trundling by to add a sense of surrealism to the aftermath of Bobby’s initial rampage at the Thompson house. Bogdanovich also made the decision not to use a musical score and just let the action speak for itself, once again leaving it to Fields to pump in some ambient noises to fill in the gaps or to add tension as the only music we hear is on Bobby’s car radio, which cuts in and out as we cut between him and the pursuing cops.

Of course, Targets would be one of the last films Fields would do the sound-design for as she moved to actual film editing, where she would cut What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon for Bogdanovich, Medium Cool (1969) for Haskell Wexler, American Graffiti (1973) for George Lucas, and JAWS (1975) for Steven Spielberg, which won her a well-deserved Academy Award.

Platt, meanwhile, on top of helping with the script, props, costuming, and scouting locations, was an unofficial producer and in charge of the film’s art and production design. And through her magic, with a little paint and ingenuity, the screening room, the hotel bungalow, the lounge, and the Thompson house were all shot on the same set using the exact same flats. Note, to, the color design, where all of the Orlok sequences are done in warm and welcoming colors while all the Bobby sequences are done in cool blues or stark whites. The goal was to make the house almost fairy tale like, to appear normal to the point of being broken.

As for the director himself, Bogdanovich constantly consulted his own mental rolodex, calling on the experiences and advice of all those directors and technicians he had interviewed over the years as we can see a lot of Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock and Welles in all those long takes, matching pans and dollies, and always cutting on some form of matching movement.

And there’s a lot of Corman in there, too, as a good chunk of the film had to be improvised on the spot or shot guerilla style because, apparently, it was against the law to shoot anything on or near a freeway in California at the time, necessitating a highly coordinated and highly illegal shoot via walkie-talkies to get the sniper set-piece at the refinery as Bobby picks off those passing motorists -- a scene that might’ve been inspired by another recent true-crime incident from a few years prior, where a 16-year-old shot at motorists from a hilltop along Highway 101 just south of Orcutt, California, killing three and injuring 10 before committing suicide, leaving a note behind which vowed to make his parents "die a thousand times in court" for his actions.

And they might’ve made it a little too real as someone saw one of those extras fall as if shot as instructed and called the cops. And with the sound of approaching sirens, with no permits, the crew fled -- but not before Kovacs managed to catch a couple passing patrolmen on film before pulling the plug.

And mixing all of that together, Bogdanovich, who also served as the film’s uncredited editor, shows a well-assured hand for a first time director. This film moves, and its momentum is both harrowing and enticing. Thus, by some minor miracle, after 23-days of shooting -- five with Karloff, two at the refinery, 12 at the Reseda Drive-In, and four for everything else, exhausting his limited budget as he went (-- in the end, it cost about $100,000), Bogdanovich had himself a tight little thriller that he was hesitant to turn over to American International once it was completed, who were ready to sell it under the dubious exploitative title, Blood and Candy. The film was shot under the title Before I Die, and then changed to Human Targets before finally settling on just Targets.

But Corman gave Bogdanovich his blessing to shop the film around first. He found a nibble at Paramount, where it was championed by Robert Evans, and then sealed the deal with a couple of favorable reviews in Variety. Thus, Paramount bought the picture from Corman for $200,000. Unfortunately, by the time it was finally ready to release, the country had suffered through the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, giving the studio cold feet, who eventually dumped the movie into theaters in August of 1968, where it didn’t leave much of an impression at the box-office.

However, on the strength of the craftsmanship involved with the filming of Targets, Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson threw Bogdanovich and Platt a lifeline, saying they were welcome to do something for their BBS Productions anytime they wanted, which resulted in The Last Picture Show (1971), which netted multiple Academy Award nominations, sending Bogdanovich on a meteoric rise as one of Hollywood’s new Young Turks, which led to a critical re-evaluation of his inaugural feature, which I still contend was the best film the director would ever make.

Of course, Bogdanovich’s personal life went into a tailspin not long after this as he and Platt divorced and the director took up with Cybil Shepherd. Sadly, both Bogdanovich and Platt were better together than apart as far as filmmaking goes; and Bogdanovich has taken a lot of grief at the time of this writing over the recent retrospective on Platt by Karina Longworth on the You Must Remember This podcast, which paints the director as a philandering narcissist and an insufferable ass. Honestly, I kinda felt that way about the guy already and got into a bit of a dust-up with one of his defenders on Facebook until I pointed out that even though I felt that way about him some of the best films ever made were done by insufferable, narcissistic assholes.

Sure, there were a lot of hands in the pot on Targets, and all of them deserve credit for the film’s myriad merits. But like another independent horror film that came out in 1968, Night of the Living Dead (1968), the lion share of credit over the years went to George Romero and George Romero alone. And yet, if you look at his catalog made without those who participated in Night of the Living Dead, there always seems to be a certain something missing. With Bogdanovich, the differences were even more stark.

Look, let me explain it this way: there’s a scene in Targets during the climax; a scene concocted by Bogdanovich, Platt and Fuller, directed by Bogdanovich, set-dressed by Platt, where Kovacs set the lighting and then moves the camera down a dolly as this take slowly moves from a boy sitting in a car, in obvious shock, looking at something to his left, where the sliding camera finally reveals he’s been staring at his father, whose neck was blown out by one of the sniper’s bullets. On the ambient soundtrack, Fields has the boy crying softly, now off-screen, until there is another shot, and that crying suddenly stops -- the implication clear without showing us a thing.

That, Boils and Ghouls, is cooperative filmmaking at its finest. Now imagine that kind of tension-building skills on display for 90-straight minutes and you might have some inkling as to how good and disturbing Targets really is, was, and ever shall be.

Well, if you don't know what Hubrisween is by now, Boils and Ghouls, I don't think I can help you. Anyhoo, that's 24 films down with just two, count 'em, TWO more to go. Up next, You'll Find Out. No. Really.

Targets (1968) Saticoy Productions :: Paramount Pictures / EP: Roger Corman / P: Peter Bogdanovich / AP: Daniel Selznick / D: Peter Bogdanovich / W: Peter Bogdanovich, Polly Platt / C: László Kovács / E: Peter Bogdanovich / M: Charles Greene, Brian Stone / S: Tim O'Kelly, Boris Karloff, Peter Bogdanovich, Nancy Hsueh, Tanya Morgan, Mary Jackson, James Brown, Arthur Peterson, Monte Landis, Warren White, Sandy Baron

Hubrisween 2020 :: W is for Werewolves on Wheels (1971)

2020-10-28T03:23:00.002-05:00

On a lonesome highway, out of the heat and rippling haze of the desert, The Devil’s Advocates ride. Now that is one inspired name for a motorcycle club, and there appears to be about a baker’s dozen of them on bikes with a couple of biker skanks bringing up the rear in an old ambulance.

And as they roll along, snogging their old ladies, popping pills, smoking some reefer, and dabbling in a few other hallucinogens, they continue to ride. And ride. And ride. And ride and ride and ride. Sensing a theme here.

Trouble starts when a straggler is run off the road by a couple of good ol’ boys in a pick-up truck; and as the other Advocates burn rubber in pursuit, these locals manage to give them the slip. Ah, but these not so bright hit-n-runners then make the bone-headed mistake of stopping at the very next available gas station -- so it isn’t that big of a surprise when the Advocates roar up and surround them, looking for a little payback.

Led by Adam (Oliver), the gang’s leader, he forcefully pulls the driver out and then proceeds to give him a big old wet kiss on the lips!? (Wow.) He then punches him in the stomach (-- that’s better), and then turns him over to the rest of the gang, who proceed to beat the shit out of him. But the Advocates aren't completely ruthless as they leave the geriatric passenger alone; and after the bloodied driver is unceremoniously dumped in the back of the truck, the old man stomps on the gas and tears off.

Having had enough fun, the Advocates let them go and invade the gas station instead. And while the others imbibe huge amounts of beer, Helen (Anderson) -- Adam’s old lady, wants Tarot, the spiritual sage of this group, to tell her fortune. But Tarot (Barry) gets really crabby at this notion because he “reads” the cards and doesn’t “tell” fortunes.

And it doesn’t matter anyway because he won’t do readings for chicks. At first, this makes Adam happy because he doesn’t like it when the morose Tarot starts messing with his cards -- I guess it makes him even more morose. But Helen is so insistent, he finally orders Tarot to do it, just to make her shut.

Wanting to know how she's going to die, Helen watches as Tarot lays out the Chariot Card, the Lover’s Card, and the Angel Card. (Now do you wanna hit, or stand pat?) Next comes the Devil’s Card, which Tarot ominously warns will have a future influence on her future. And then he deals another, more ominous card that says her fate is predetermined, meaning she cannot change it.

Saying this is all a crock, Adam won’t let him flip the last card. But Helen's really got her panties in a knot to know, so Tarot continues with the final play: Helen will die by a lightning strike in the Tower of Satan. (You know, I had a vision once where mall walkers trampled me to death. Walked right out of the Sam Goody and BAM! -- I wonder if they have a card for that?)

Suddenly, overcome with disturbing visions of death and the Cloven One, Tarot is visibly shaken by these results. But Adam snaps him out of it, still insisting it's all a load of bullshit, and then herds everyone outside to head deeper into the wilderness for a little R’n’R. So they’re off again, and we’re entreated to another long travelogue sequence until they eventually stop at a fork in the road for a beer break.

Unable to shake those apocalyptic visions, Tarot is still a bit uneasy as Adam chides him for believing in all that mumbo-jumbo. But Tarot says he only believes in the truth, and claims he can show them all the "real truth" if they're willing to follow. They are, so he leads his fellow Advocates down the fork less traveled into a primordial woods.

Ditching the bikes, they head further into the trees and find a huge circle of stones in a clearing -- obviously an altar of some kind, where they commence to have a drunken orgy. But it isn’t very hard to spot the Tower of Satan lurking in the background; an exact match to Tarot's prophetic vision.

And when Adam starts calling for the Devil to come out and join the party, he doesn't realize the Devil is listening -- and has every intention of taking him up on that invitation...

The origins of the Outlaw Biker flick can be traced back to the summer of 1947, when the American Motorcyclist Association [AMA] sponsored a Gypsy Tour and Rally in Hollister, California, over the July 4th weekend, where around 4000 bikers showed up -- mostly returning veterans, trying to readjust to civilian life, which was about 3985 more bikers than the town could really accommodate.

And then a couple of rival clubs -- the Boozefighters and the Pissed-Off Bastards of Bloomington, allegedly got into a rumble, resulting in the so-called Hollister Riot. I say allegedly, and so-called, because aside from some public drunkenness and general disorderliness, there wasn't much of a riot.

However, inspired by a (posed) picture he saw in LIFE Magazine about the rowdy weekend, writer Frank Rooney wrote a fictionalized tale called "Cyclists' Raid" for Harper's Magazine, where a gang of hooligans ride in and take over a small town. Fiction soon clouded the truth, and a legend was born.

Thus, it was Rooney's imagined Hollister Riot that inspired Stanley Kramer's The Wild One (1953), recognized by most as the first Outlaw Biker flick, which in turn helped create a whole new genre. The film also influenced the bikers themselves; but it should be pointed out most of them were emulating Lee Marvin's skuzzy Chino, and not Marlon Brando's pretty boy Johnny.

And starting with Roger Corman's mucho profitable The Wild Angels (1966) -- inspired again by an article in LIFE Magazine about the massive funeral of a legendary Hell's Angel member, most subsequent biker films followed suit, focusing on the rough and rowdy world of life on the road, using real biker gang members in their films as extras.

With low production costs and money to be made, over the next few years some 40 to 50 Outlaw Biker flicks were unleashed on the public -- The Glory Stompers (1967), The Devil's Angels (1967), Angels from Hell (1968), Satan's Sadists (1969), Angels Die Hard (1970) and Angels, Hard as They Come (1971) to name just a few; but by the dawn of the 1970s the genre was no longer firing on all cylinders. And as filmmakers almost always do when a genre is about to die, they start tinkering with the formula or combine it with another to try and squeeze a few more box-office dollars out of it.

Cross-dressing homosexuals was the hook for The Pink Angels (1971). In the horribly mistitled Hell's Bloody Devils (1970), Al Adamson stuck some bikers into his James Bond knock-off with less than stellar results.

So it was inevitable, then, that somebody would start combining the biker and horror genres; and none other than Herschell Gordon Lewis got there first and started the blood flowing with She-Devils on Wheels (1968). And then there was Psychomania (1973) -- the tale of a British biker gang selling their souls to the devil for immortality. Strange film. They worship a toad. I'm serious.

Now, Michel Levesque had worked on a couple of these films -- Richard Rush’s The Savage Seven (1968), and Bruce Clark’s The Naked Angels (1969), crewing as a set designer or serving as an art director for both Roger Corman’s New World and American International Pictures. And the constant rumor on those sets was that if you could come up with a decent idea for a biker movie, a horror movie, a drug movie, or any combination of all three, odds were good it would probably get made by somebody.

And so, Levesque teamed up with his friend, David Kaufman, who turned out a seven page treatment that combined elements of Satanism, lycanthropy, and the burgeoning cinematic biker tropes. And taking these barest notions of an idea, they started scouting out some locations in the deserts of California to plug these notions into and expand on them. And once the first draft of the script was complete, they turned it over to producer Paul Lewis, hoping he would know someone to pass it along to that might be interested in making a slightly blasphemous Werewolves vs. Bikers flick.

By 1970, Lewis had carved himself out quite the niche as a production manager, breaking in on a couple of existential Monte Hellman westerns -- The Shooting (1966), Ride the Whirlwind (1966), before handling several genre milestones, including Tom Laughlin’s The Born Losers (1967), which introduced the world to that kung-fu pacifist, Billy Jack, Richard Rush’s ode to the Haight-Ashbury scene in Psych-Out (1968), and Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s Outlaw Biker movie to end all Outlaw Biker movies, Easy Rider (1969).

And by mere happenstance, Lewis now had two proposed scripts for a Werewolf Biker movie on his desk. The other had an entire gang of werewolves that rode from town to town on a massive killing spree. But he liked Levesque and Kaufman’s more cost-effective ideas better, who were surprised that Lewis not only liked their pitch but planned to produce the movie himself. And not only that, but he pegged Levesque to direct it; something he had never done before. Kaufman, meanwhile, had hoped to take another run at their script but Lewis felt it was ready to go, as is.

And to me, this kind of explains a lot from what we’ve seen thus far as most of the dialogue appears to be ad-libbed over the barest bones of a script -- but ad-libbed very well by the mostly amateur cast. Stephen Oliver, a last second casting decision, was already a genre veteran and provided a solid anchor for the others to follow; and if you look closely among the Advocates, you can spot folk-singer Barry "Eve of Destruction" McGuire and former child star Billy Gray -- most likely known for playing young Bobby Benson in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and for being one of the kids in the long running sit-com, Father Knows Best (1954-1960), who had just come off a much publicized marijuana bust.

Donna “DJ” Anderson had just appeared in Count Yorga (1971), and does pretty well with a pretty thankless role. Noted comedian Severn Darden played Satan's head disciple, whom we'll be meeting in a sec. Turns out he was a friend of Lewis’ and apparently made up most of the ritualistic mumbo-jumbo he spouts in the film. And according to Levesque in a later interview, most of the cast were completely stoned for the entire shoot. Method acting, I guess.

When an initial deal with American International fell apart, another distributor was soon found with Joe Solomon's Fanfare Productions. Now Solomon was one of the quieter patron saints of exploitation cinema -- Simon King of the Witches (1971) Tower of Evil (1972), who brought us plenty of biker mayhem: Wild Wheels (1968), Run, Angel, Run (1969), and Nam's Angels -- a/k/a The Losers (1970), where the government sends some renegade bikers to Vietnam on a covert rescue mission.

When Fanfare released Werewolves on Wheels (1971), the poster and press-kits screamed, "The gang thought it was tough 'til they met THE BRIDE OF SATAN!" And all the promotional materials, including a complimentary barf-bag in case the film made you sick (-- hopefully for the right reasons), promised us lycanthropic hooligans on Harley's.

But what we really got was a different kind of monster altogether, which will soon present itself as the Advocates' drunken orgy continues unabated until a platoon of monks appear from out of nowhere, who offer the revelers some bread and wine.

Unknown to the slovenly bikers, however, who greedily accept and gorge themselves, the wine has been drugged and they all start dropping like flies. (And can you imagine the potency it would take to knock this crowd out? Wow.) Once they’re all out for a snooze, the head monk shows up, announcing himself as One, the spokesman for He Who Must Remain Silent Forever (Darden), who babbles in a satanic circular logic for a while, and then removes a strand of hair from Helen.

Returning to the tower, One calls upon his Master and sacrifices a cat, draining its blood into a cup, and then throws the carcass into the fire. Taking the collected blood, he draws a crude circle around himself, leaving only a small gap for the Bride of Satan to enter. He then constructs a crude fetish doll out of wax and sticks Helen's stolen hair onto it. Then, after inviting the other monks to circle up and join the ceremony, One leads them in a chant to summon their Master's new Bride.

Outside, in the passed-out pile of Advocates, Helen stirs and slowly rises. Compelled by One, she is mesmerized and drawn into the temple; and at this point ya might think that you’ve had some spiked wine, too, as she switches frequently from biker gear to a wedding dress.

And when she enters the altar room in a puff of smoke, One dips some bread into the cat blood and feeds it to her. And before you know it, she’s buck-naked and doing a strangely provocative dance number around the large fire-pit while caressing a human skull and a snake!

When the other Advocates slowly start to wake up, Adam is the first to notice Helen is missing. Hearing the hootenanny going on inside the temple, he rousts everybody else up to go and rescue her.

Meantime, inside, One is smearing blood all over that wax fetish doll until Adam and the others burst. Seeing what they've done to Helen, Adam and the other bikers start kicking some evil monk ass. But as the Advocates make quick work of his minions, One drops the wax doll into the fire; and as it melts, Helen screams.

But this also seemingly frees her from his spell as Adam grabs his girl and they make their escape -- though not before each biker gets some ash smeared on his face, marking them for future malfeasance.

As day breaks, to put as much distance between themselves and that damnable tower, the Advocates head further into the desert. (Yay, more travelogue footage.) When night falls and they make camp, Helen drops some acid and starts doing a standard freak-out dance around the fire (-- that's nowhere near as entertaining as her earlier number if I’m being honest).

Suddenly, she has a horrific vision of the wax doll bearing her face, melting in the fire, and goes screaming into the night. As Adam chases after her, the other bikers decide to mock the ritual they just witnessed and start chanting, "Oobla doobla ooggla urbla," and chase each other around the bonfire until Mouse (Orr) decides to make Shirley (Brown) his own personal Bride of Satan. She’s willing, but he’ll have to catch her first.

Meanwhile, one sand dune over, Adam and Helen are in the process of doing the nasty; but she throws a hitch in their foreplay when she bites her lover on the neck. Nearby, Mouse and Shirley’s game of tag has degenerated into a wrestling match; only their foreplay is interrupted by a several hairy paws that start ripping them apart as we're entreated to not one, but two, slow-motion throat slashings -- complete with a rupturing geyser of arterial blood. (And just in case you missed it, they repeat this for you. Like, three times!) We then leave this scene with the shadows of two monsters savaging their victims to pieces.

The next morning, the other Advocates make the expected grisly discovery. Now, it’s pretty obvious who the monsters are, but I will point out that Adam and Helen seem to have no recollection of their actions last night. Assuming something from the desert wandered in and killed them, Adam says all they can really do now is bury them with honor under a pile of beer cans and urine and move on. Which means even more travelogue footage -- only this time it leads us to Scene 85: the gas station interlude.

Ah, the gas station interlude, my favorite part of the movie. (More on this later.) Here, the pudgy and cranky owner is a Mr. Burke -- heavy on the Mister, mister, who doesn’t like their kind and makes them pump their own gas. (Damn hippy-pinko-commie biker freaks!) He also warns them to be careful as not to burn his place down with all those lit reefers near his fuel tanks, and constantly reminds them they’re in the desert and that the only way out is to parachute straight up. (What a great kook.)

After this brief interlude ends way too soon as far as I’m concerned, Adam has them back on the road again until they finally stop for the night at an old landfill, filled with the beaten husks of dozens of old rusted-out cars. As the others get a bonfire going, Tarot goes off by himself to meditate. When Adam finds him, they get to talking. Seems Adam thinks they need to head off to Florida, like the good old days; but Tarot says something’s wrong, something bad, and has come to the regrettable conclusion he can no longer ride with the Advocates anymore.

Ignoring these qualms, Adam continues on reminiscing, making it harder for Tarot to convince him there’s evil afoot. Alas, I think Adam does hear his old friend; he just chooses not to listen and instead warns Tarot to lay off all the bad bummer vibes because he’s starting to freak everybody out.

Again, Tarot presages that he’s just telling the truth, and then, right on cue, he is gripped by another vision: He’s back in the temple, and is being force-fed some bloodied bread at the foot of a crucified Helen!

Later that night, while the others sleep, the same furry claws attack the sole biker standing watch. And after the monsters ravage and kill him, the body is unceremoniously tossed into the bonfire. (They had lit up the entire landfill, making things nice and creepy in the flickering light.)

The next morning, while fighting over the last beer, the Advocates realize someone’s missing again. Finding the burnt remains in the ashes, as a raving Tarot lays more negative waves on everybody, Adam lays the blame on those damned monks -- and he has a hankering to break his boot off in a certain evil monk's ass. And it's here, with this fateful decision, where our movie takes an even more surreal turn:

For as they head back the way they came, a freak sandstorm blows over the highway; and after the cloud engulfs the bikers this wall of sand quickly dissipates and the bikers are gone! Vanished before the very eyes of the two gals in the trailing ambulance. (I can’t begin to tell you how effective this scene is in motion.)

We then cut to the middle of the desert, where the mystically displaced Advocates find themselves lost in a sea of sand dunes with absolutely no idea how they got there. And since their bikes aren’t really built for off-road travel, it takes them a while to make it back to the highway.

Still believing those monks are behind this, Adam is still determined to settle the score; even though he's warned by an insistent Tarot that they obviously shouldn't mess with them anymore and just leave well enough alone. Fed up with all the doom-saying and questioning his every move, Adam sucker punches Tarot, triggering a brawl, where Tarot is quickly beaten into submission.

However, this initial fight and mystical detour has taken up too much valuable daylight and they have to stop for the night, where their descent into hell continues as their campsite is in the middle of a scorched piece of land and they’re up to their ankles in ash, where it once more comes to blows between Adam and Tarot, who is thrashed once more.

And as an eerie silence hangs over the Advocates gathered around the campfire, the silence is broken when Adam sees a vision of a wax dummy -- this time in his image, melting in the fire. Obviously, he freaks out at this, and then starts to painfully change.

Meantime, Helen sees her wax effigy in the fire, too, and also starts to change. Unsure of what's happening, the other bikers back off -- except for Tarot, who tries to help Helen; but it isn’t long before the remaining Advocates are facing two snarling werewolves.

Before these transformations can really sink in, the blood starts flying as Were-Adam buzzsaws through a couple of bikers, while Were-Helen chases after Tarot. Circling back to the campfire, he snatches up a makeshift torch and manages to hold her off.

Following his lead, the other Advocates take up torches, too, and set Helen on fire, who screams, falls into the campfire, and is consumed by the flames. We then get a quick, nearly subliminal blip of her in that wedding dress rising up out of the pyre like a Phoenix.

Outnumbered, the remaining werewolf jumps on his bike and roars off. With torches in hand, the others mount up and go after him, eventually catch up, and put the torch to him, too. Soon engulfed in flames, Were-Adam quickly loses control, crashes, and goes up in a huge fireball when his gas tank explodes.

To avenge their friends, Tarot leads the remaining Advocates back to the temple and heads the charge into the altar room, where they find One and some other loitering monks. But as each Advocate picks a partner to beat down, and raises his arm to strike, they see the faces of themselves under the hoods and quickly collapse.

Summarily defeated, they all succumb to the power of One, whose robes are now occupied by Adam; and Tarot is the first to be fed some bloodied bread at the foot of the crucified Helen; thus fulfilling his vision. Thus and lo, on a lonesome highway, out of the heat and rippling haze of Hell, the Devil’s Advocates will now ride for all eternity.

If I could sum up Werewolves on Wheels in one sentence it would probably go something like this: I like it -- a lot, but I don’t quite get it, especially that ending. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, mind you. At one point, during a third or fourth viewing, in a brief moment of clarity, I had it and it all made sense; but this was quickly lost before I could write it down. That happens to me a lot. Like, AH lot a lot. *sigh*

But it begs an important question: When does an exploitation film move beyond the usual crap to inspired filmmaking? I think Werewolves on Wheels definitely qualifies for the latter. Which begs an even bigger question: Was this by design, or by some divine cinematic accident?

Now, a film that promises you werewolves on wheels but doesn't really deliver them until the 70th minute of an 85-minute movie has a lot to answer for and has a pretty steep hill to climb for some. And this movie should be terrible based on that title alone; but if you can move beyond that and your preconceptions, you can see some pretty ingenious stuff going on here.

The film itself looks great and was shot with a keen eye for composition and framing, and exploits it's locales beautifully. You can really feel the heat of the desert and smell the sweat of the bikers, so to speak.

This was cinematographer Isidore Mankofsky’s first feature. A noted documentary filmmaker, it was Mankofsky’s influence on a lot of the travel footage; and it was his suggestion to capture the murmurations of all those birds and scavengers that always seem to be circling ever closer to the Advocates, ready to pick their bones clean. Levesque, meanwhile, definitely has a thing for fire purification imagery. All the fires in this film are huge, and the resulting, flickering shadows are captured beautifully by Mankofsky and will have your eyes playing tricks on you. Editor Peter Parasheles had worked with Orson Welles on Chimes at Midnight (1965) and the extended attempt to get Don Quixote (1972) made, who does an admirable job of cutting all of this together.

With the barest bones of a plot holding things together, there are enough surreal ambiguities to keep you interested, too; and the film really does feel like it was made up as they went along. Case in point: that gas station scene. From the camera angles used and the reaction of the cranky owner, I don’t think he had a clue he was being filmed. Either that or he was a colorful local that they decided to stick in -- or maybe they let him in the film to pay for the gas?

Overall, the acting is above average considering 90-percent of the cast were strictly stuntmen (the bikers) and refugees from a hippy colony (the monks). And if the majority of the dialogue was improvised, there are no blaring incidents and everything seems natural enough. And the southern-fried rock soundtrack by Don Gere is dang near perfect. E'yup, I got another song stuck in the old random play jukebox in my noggin: "Oh I've got one foot in heaven, and the other in hell..."

If the film fails at all, and it's only a small bump, it's in the make-up department. According to the commentary track on the Dark Sky Films release of Werewolves on Wheels, the film had a sixteen day shooting schedule and the budget only allowed for three days with the uncredited make-up man, whom Levesque claims worked for Walt Disney. The werewolves themselves look fine enough to me when we finally do get to see them, I just don’t think we get to see them enough. As for that somewhat abbreviated climactic battle, Levesque also claims he was supposed to get another day of shooting to shore up the chase scene when they run down Were-Adam on the bike but, once again, they had simply run out of time and money and had to make due with what they had. Another budget casualty was a Divine lightning strike that was supposed to blow up the tower to fulfill Helen’s prophetic fate, too.

Apparently, there was a lot more explicit gore in the film, too. And while we do get to see a few geysers of blood, the newly formed MPAA came down hard on the film due to it's excessive violence and harsh language used in all that ad-libbing. After submitting the film twice, they were slapped with an X-Rating each time and were told unless they got serious and really started editing things down for a third try there would be no fourth. And so, they complied -- though it should be noted a lot of this excised footage was restored for the Dark Sky DVD release, which looks so much better than those old murky VHS tapes, where you can actually see what’s going on in the dark now.

As I said before, there are several elements of this film that I just can’t quite figure out, or quite piece together, and it's really bugging me. Was Tarot in league with the Satanists to begin with? He led them down the path to the Devil’s Temple in the first place, right? Right. But then he did try to save them. And then he led the late charge to avenge his friends, right? Right. Maybe it was his fate -- and he knew it, and he knew he couldn't change it, and therefore he was just fulfilling his own destiny ... Oh, wow. Maybe I do get it.

Well, if you don't know what Hubrisween is by now, Boils and Ghouls, I don't think I can help you. Anyhoo, that's 23 films down with THREE yet to go. Up next, The King of Terror is Dead, Long Live the King.

Werewolves on Wheels (1971) South Street Films :: The Fanfare Corporation / EP: Joe Solomon / P: Paul Lewis / AP: Stuart Fleming / D: Michel Levesque / W: David M. Kaufman, Michel Levesque / C: Isidore Mankofsky / E: Peter Parasheles / M: Don Gere / S: Steve Oliver, DJ Anders, Gene Shane, Billy Gray, Barry McGuire, Owen Orr, Anna Lynn Brown, Severn Darden

Hubrisween 2020 :: V is for The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

2020-10-27T03:30:00.001-05:00

Our story begins at the turn of the 20th century down in Mexico, where the camera ominously sweeps along some desolate rock formations and canyon walls that are determined to keep their secrets hidden at all costs. And as a case in point, we soon spy a band of gypsies -- a search party, actually, scouring these rocks for a stray, who dared probe beyond these natural barriers.

Led by Carlos, the missing man’s brother, they soon find him, stumbling around, torn to pieces and half-dead, with a cloth sack clutched in his hand, whose contents are very much alive and kicking and desperately wants to be let loose.

As the others catch up to him, the injured man collapses and finally succumbs to his terrible wounds. Here, Carlos (Rojo) pries the sack away from the dead man; it’s unknown contents about the size of a feral cat (-- but if that thing is a cat, this feline sure does think it's a horse judging by the noises it’s making. Weird).

Fearful of an old prophecy that promises a horrible death to those who try to steal anything from the ruler of this forbidden valley, Zorina (Jackson), the clan’s withered old matriarch, orders Carlos to release the animal immediately. But Carlos doesn’t put much stock in ancient curses and refuses, despite the warning his brother gave him with his dying breath -- just one word: Gwangi.

Cut to sometime later, where we spy a broken down circus and stunt-show that’s barely eking out a living as it tours the small villages south of the Rio Grande.

Enter Tuck Kirby (Franciscus), a former rider and stuntman for this outfit, who now buys acts for Buffalo Bill Cody’s more renown and successful Wild West Show. There to purchase Omar the Wonder Horse, this derelict operation’s only real attraction, whose act is being ridden up a series of ramps and then diving off a high platform into a blazing pool of water.

But after taking in this grand finale amongst the sparse crowd, Tuck’s sales pitch runs right into a brick wall in the form of Miss T.J. Breckenridge (Golan) -- the show's owner, Omar's rider, and Tuck's former flame that he ran out on a few years back, who refuses to sell and orders her foreman, Champ Connors (Carlson), to escort this lout off the premises immediately.

As a scalded Tuck limps back into town with his new best friend, a young street hustler and opportunist named Lope (Arden), they encounter Professor Horace Bromley, currently traveling on foot due to some of Lope’s shenanigans and a mule that wasn’t quite as saddle-broke as the boy had claimed when he sold it to him.

After giving the old man a ride to his encampment, Bromley (Naismith) explains that he is a paleontologist out on a fossil hunt, and is currently looking for corroborative evidence on a fossil he recently unearthed, whose implications could rewrite history as we now know it!

Showing this discovery off to Tuck, Bromley points out the fossilized humanoid leg bone embedded in the rock and the curious three-toed mini-footprints surrounding it, claiming they belong to the Eohippus -- the Dawn Horse, the great-great-great grandfather of modern equines, whose species went extinct millions of years before man walked the Earth. Or so we all thought -- if Bromley can prove it. Tuck wishes him luck.

Next, after giving her a sufficient cooling-off period -- and I’m thinking days and not hours, Tuck returns to the arena, where TJ and Carlos, who apparently works for her now, are currently watching a bullfighter audition for the show. But all of Tuck’s attempts at ingratiation goes nowhere until Lope foolishly climbs into the ring and draws the attention of an enraged bull.

Both Tuck and Carlos jump in to save the boy; and while Carlos does most of the work keeping the bull at bay, it’s Tuck to whom TJ runs to first when it’s all over. And after patching him up, turns out there’s still the teensiest bit of a romantic spark between these two. And as Tuck fans these rekindled flames, TJ finally reveals why she can’t sell Omar.

Turns out Omar is an integral part of the show’s new main attraction: El Diablo, the World's Tiniest Horse, which she then unveils to Tuck. And when the little horse-like creature trots out of its miniature stable, Tuck is at a loss for words as he gets an earful from TJ, who can’t help but gloat over her new guaranteed money-maker with El Diablo prancing around on a platform strapped to the back of Omar.

Noting El Diablo’s tiny, three-toed hooves, Tuck asks where did she ever find such a thing? But TJ isn’t sure, saying it was a gift from Carlos -- solving the mystery of what was in that bag. Intended as a sign of affection, Carlos is none too happy that Tuck has now come back, driving a wedge between them, and refuses to divulge anything.

Remembering Bromley’s fossil find, and thinking TJ has no idea of the true goldmine she may have here, Tuck sneaks the paleontologist in for a peek at El Diablo in hopes he can identify it. Saying the animal appears to be a bona fide Eohippus, Bromley, of course, is shocked to see something alive and well that was supposed to have died out 49-million years ago -- give or take a million years.

Wanting to know if there are any more unique specimens out there, with Lope’s help, the two men circumnavigate Carlos and seek out those gypsies. But after talking with the belligerent Zorina, who not only says they won’t show them where the Forbidden Valley is located, but they will also stop at nothing to return the little creature from whence it came. That’s enough for Tuck, who wants to protect TJ’s investment. But Bromley lingers behind and conspires with Zorina, telling her where the little horse is being hidden for his own mercenary purposes.

When Tuck sniffs out Bromley’s deception through Lope, he tries to put a stop to it. But he’s already too late as the gypsies have knocked-out Carlos and absconded with El Diablo -- all part of Bromley’s plan, as he intends to follow them and learn the location of the Forbidden Valley, where he will find more specimens and the co-conspirators will free the animal and nullify the curse.

Carlos revives just in time to see Tuck ride off in pursuit of the gypsies, only he tells TJ and Champ that it was Tuck who stole El Diablo. Rounding up two more hands, Rowdy and Bean (Kilbane, De Barros), a royally pissed off TJ leads her posse into the desert in pursuit of that no-good horse thief.

Now, all of these interested parties -- Tuck, Bromley and Lope, TJ and her posse, all collide just as the freed El Diablo makes his way back into the isolated Forbidden Valley through a small fissure. They all make peace when Lope rats out Bromley, saying this was all his idea and not Tuck’s.

And with a little work, they are able to widen the fissure just enough to get them and the horses through to the other side and into the lost valley that time forgot proper.

And while they don’t find El Diablo, the group is attacked by a winged Pteranodon that snatches Lope off his mule. But the boy proves too heavy and Carlos is able to bulldog the flying dinosaur to the ground as it struggles to get away, eventually breaking its neck -- much to Bromley’s horror.

But he doesn’t mourn this loss for long as another prized specimen presents itself, which he identifies as an Ornithomimus. And as the others wind-up their lassos to go and catch this giant “plucked ostrich” for the show, it flees deeper into the valley.

Now, this somewhat whimsical pursuit continues until it comes to an abrupt halt when another dinosaur lunges from out of nowhere -- an Allosaurus, who seizes the smaller dinosaur within its deadly jaws, crushing and killing it.

Carlos takes one look at this creature and knows this big lizard is Gwangi, the evil one he was warned about, who rules this valley; and they are all in some serious doo-doo as Gwangi sees them, too, and the hunters officially become the hunted...

It's somewhat ironic that it was Hammer Studios who got master stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen back in the dinosaur business.

For it was this same studio's Gothic horror revival with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958) that officially sounded the death-knell on the resurgent sci-fi boom of the 1950s, which essentially began with the huge financial success of the revived prehistoric monster gone amok in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and effectively brought an end to all those giant monster movies that Harryhausen, who had brought that Beast to life, and his partner, producer Charles Schneer, had been making together at Columbia since It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), which they followed up with Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956) and 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957).

And after a string of fantasy pictures based on the myths and legends of old -- book-ended by The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Hammer hired Harryhausen as a freelancer to work some of his Dynamation magic on One Million Years B.C. (1966) -- a loose remake of Hal Roach’s One Million B.C. (1940), whose combination of dinosaur action and 40-pounds of Raquel Welch strapped into a 20-pound fur-lined bikini would prove to be a box-office bonanza for Hammer and 20th Century Fox.

Thus and so, with dinosaurs suddenly back in vogue, wanting to strike while things were hot, Harryhausen and Schneer decided their next collaboration should also involve these prehistoric beasties. In fact, they kinda wanted to double-down and kicked around the idea of time-displacing Sinbad -- their other big money-maker, and having him come into conflict with some dinosaurs; but this notion didn’t get much further than a few conceptual sketches. Thus, for their next feature, Harryhausen wound up digging into his own prehistory to give them a suitable vehicle for what they needed.

As the legend goes, Ray Harryhausen fell in love with the stop-motion animated process when he first encountered King Kong (1933) during its initial theatrical release at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, and soon became obsessed with the technique and the craftsman credited with bringing all those monsters to life, Willis O’Brien.

Devouring everything he could on the subject matter and combining it with another obsession -- the artwork of Charles Knight, who fleshed-out those dinosaur fossils on paper in several dramatic scenes of life in prehistoric times, Harryhuasen started making his own models and animated them on film.

He was finally able to meet O’Brien in person in 1939 through the efforts of a mutual friend, when a phone call ended with an invitation for the young Harryhausen to bring some of his models over to MGM Studios, where O’Brien was currently in the pre-production phase of War Eagles; a wild epic conceived by Merian C. Cooper as a follow-up to King Kong, where a lost race of Viking warriors, who rode giant prehistoric eagles, is discovered in Antarctica, who wind up battling a bunch of surrogate Nazi dirigibles over the skies of Manhattan during the film’s climax.

Here, Harryhausen gaped in wonder at the large storyboard illustrations by Duncan Gleason and the animation models created by Marcel Delgado and George Lofgren, who had also worked on Kong. Somewhat embarrassed, he presented one of his own models to O’Brien, who did not sugarcoat his critique. But he was more encouraging than disparaging, telling Harryhausen to study anatomy and physiology to give his skeletal structures and musculature more accuracy -- and most importantly of all, to infuse character into these models and not just move them around.

Alas, an escalating budget, studio politics, and the growing threat of war soon found the plug pulled on War Eagles, which was too bad because everything uncovered about that production shows it really would’ve been something else on the big screen.

O’Brien always had the damndest of bad luck post-King Kong, where he was hired on to supply the special-effects for at least a half-dozen features before they all suddenly dried up right before a single frame of film was shot. Harryhausen remained in contact with O’Brien over these difficult years and mounting disappointments as he took his advice to heart and honed his craft, and their families became close friends.

Right before he went into the Army, where he served under Frank Capra in the film unit of the Special Service Division for the duration of World War II, Harryhausen visited O’Brien at RKO, where yet another one of those doomed features was well into pre-production. The proposed film this time was called Gwangi -- a Native American term for big lizard, where a group of rodeo cowboys venture into a hidden valley.

And after discovering it's inhabited by dinosaurs, in perhaps the wildest round-up scene ever conceived, they try to rope and capture an Allosaurus. Again, there were extensive production sketches, miniatures and models built for the production only to be abandoned indefinitely, once again, due to budget concerns.

However, parts of Gwangi still managed to survive when several of its set-pieces were later incorporated into Mighty Joe Young (1948), including the team-roping sequence and a climactic battle between the big gorilla and several lions.

O’Brien had hired Harryhausen to be the animation supervisor on the picture. And while O’Brien would later accept an Academy Award for the special-effects rendered in the film, it was clear the uncredited student had now become the master when it came to bringing these models to life on screen.

Now, it was during the production of Mighty Joe Young when Harryhausen and his mentor got to talking about the failed Gwangi project. Here, O’Brien gave him a copy of the unused script and a series of leftover storyboards. And it was these very same items Harryhausen dug out of his garage and dusted off in 1966, which he then presented to Schneer, who agreed to revive the picture as their next production -- The Valley Where Time Stood Still.

And while Harryhausen set to work on a series of eight principle drawings for the Dyna-Magic set-pieces, the old script was turned over to William Bast for a little punching up, who shifted the action from modern times to the early 1900s.

Meantime, Schneer was trying to secure financing for the production when Columbia turned them down over cost considerations and the box-office disappointments of the last few features they did for them. But Harryhausen got to know Kenneth Hyman while working for Hammer, which gave them an in with Hyman’s father, Eliot Hyman, whose Seven Arts Productions had just completed a semi-hostile takeover of Warner Bros, turning them into Warner Bros -Seven Arts. And seeing how much money Fox had made with One Million Years B.C. Hyman readily agreed to finance the film on one condition -- a title change to The Valley of Gwangi (1969).

In an effort to save money, the film was shot in Spain, taking advantage of the other-worldly rock formations of the Ciudad Encantada located just outside the city of Cuenca, which subbed in beautifully for the environs of the Forbidden Valley. And once principle photography wrapped, Harryhausen returned to England and Shepperton Studios in October, 1967, where he had done the stop-motion effects for One Million Years B.C., where it took nearly a whole year to complete the over 400 stop-motion cuts in what was to become his most ambitious work to date. The film’s showcase centerpiece -- his take on that wildest round-up in screen history, took over five months to complete all on its own, which I think rivals or even betters the climactic skeleton brawl at the end of Jason and the Argonauts.

A bold claim, given that we haven’t seen a whole lot yet as far as Dynamation goes in The Valley of Gwangi so far; but, oh, Boils and Ghouls, hang on to your collective butts as our cowboys flee from the pursuing Allosaurus, only to wind up being caught between Gwangi and a cranky Styracosaurus.

When their rifles prove useless -- later discovered to be filled with the harmless stage blanks they use during their wild west stunt-spectacular, they find refuge in a cave while the dinosaurs withdraw after a brief Mexican stand-off and go their separate ways.

Then, after a long night, where Tuck and TJ agree to leave all of this nonsense behind and make another go of it together -- if they manage to get out of there alive, when the sun comes up Tuck goes off in search of some water to refill their depleted canteens.

But while he fills them up in a nearby stream, his horse starts to panic when Gwangi once more lumbers into view -- where we see some of that infusion of character, when the dinosaur angrily scratches at an annoying itch on his nose, which was also a nod to O’Brien for a similar gag pulled by the T-Rex in King Kong.

Pursued all the way back to the cave, when spears and torches prove ineffective in driving the creature off, the gathered cowboys resort to the only weapons they have left -- their lassos.

Now, I’m not even going to try to do this scene justice in typed words and just encourage you all to watch it as soon as possible. And here’s some vid-caps to give you some idea as to what actually transpired.

And here's a few more.

Aaaaaaand a few more.

And when this rousing sequence reaches a fever pitch, to their credit and skills, these cowboys almost have Gwangi strung out, trussed up, and captured before that Styracosaurus comes back and interrupts this rodeo, dividing the attention of his attackers, giving the other dinosaur the distraction it needed to chew through the ropes and break free.

And as these two great beasts lock in combat once more, Tuck and the others make a break for the valley entrance. But Gwangi makes quick work of the horned dinosaur, who had been gravely wounded when it was speared in the ribs by Carlos, and roars after them.

And while the others make it out, that curse comes back to bite Carlos in the ass, who was bringing up the rear, as Gwangi catches up, chomps the man right off his horse, and then gruesomely turns him into an appetizer!

Not satisfied, in his attempt to get at the main course, Gwangi tries to follow them out of the valley, but that fissure wasn’t quite big enough and he gets stuck; and when his violent struggle eventually causes the entrance to collapse, the dinosaur is knocked-out cold.

With the monster subdued, he's muzzled, caged-up, and hauled back to civilization as the new main attraction for TJ’s show, who seems to have chucked all those plans and promises she made with Tuck the night before.

Blinded by the pursuit of fortune and glory, she’s disappointed that Tuck will not be sticking around after the big unveiling. But never fear, true believers, she changes her mind before it's too late -- which is a lot sooner than you'd think!

Because, unbeknownst to them, those gypsies have sabotaged Gwangi’s cage so he may punish those who tried to imprison him. This backfires on the culprits just a bit when the curtain rises for the big reveal, where the audience gets to see the saboteur get eaten alive.

And in the resulting panic, when Gwangi breaks loose, Zorina gets trampled to death by the panicked mob as they flee the stadium.

And after dispatching an elephant (-- and I’m really starting to suspect that Harryhausen had something against pachyderms since he killed another one in 20 Million Miles to Earth), Gwangi’s rampage continues unabated as he breaks out of the arena and starts munching on the fleeing spectators.

In the ensuing chaos, Tuck, TJ and Lope manage to find each other and try to seek refuge in a large cathedral; but Gwangi knocks down the door before they can get it properly secured.

And as he pursues them deeper into this massive church, the dinosaur knocks over several burning braziers, which soon sets everything ablaze.

And as this fire turns into a raging inferno, Tuck and the others manage to escape but Gwangi remains trapped inside, where he is eventually crushed to death as the burning building collapses on top of him.

You know, to me, there's a huge difference when categorizing what you feel is the best film as opposed to what your favorite film is. And to those ends, while I can honestly say I think Jason and the Argonauts is probably Harryhausen's best film, The Valley of Gwangi will always be my favorite.

Gwangi is also his second best film in my opinion, and Argonauts is my second favorite. And strangely enough, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers appears third on both lists -- even though Harryhausen claims that was his worst. Weird.

Now, I freely admit I am in a small but very vocal minority when it comes to trumpeting the merits of this film. And I think a lot of that has to do with The Valley of Gwangi’s hokey premise and relative obscurity due to a disastrous theatrical release.

See, when the film was finally finished it had taken so long there had been yet another regime change at Warners in the interim. And the new studio brass had no interest in what the old regime was responsible for and the film kinda got lost in the shuffle until it was eventually banished to the bottom half of some very mismatched double-bills with little fanfare or publicity, where it ran with the adult-oriented Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) or the imported comedy crime caper, The Seven Golden Men (1969), where it completely missed its target audience. But if it was lucky, like when it played in my neck of the woods, it was at least paired-up with another -- albeit more traditional, western, The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (1969).

But no matter what it got paired up with, The Valley of Gwangi had no studio support and quickly disappeared from circulation and was never re-issued like some of Harryhausen’s earlier films. It also failed to show up on home video until the 1990s and that’s why for the longest time this was considered Harryhausen's forgotten film, or at best least known, and that's too bad because you all are missing one heck of a movie.

As with all Schneer and Harryhausen films, one of The Valley of Gwangi's main perks is that it doesn't fall into a familiar B-movie trap. For even though Harryhausen's creatures are the showpieces and the main reason to watch, these films are seldom boring in-between those FX shots as the stories surrounding them are solid, competently directed, acted and executed -- although I understand there were some prickly creative differences between Schneer and director James O'Connolly on this one. On screen, everything looks just great and the compositions of cinematographer, Erwin Hillier, add a lot and keeps things interesting to look at between dino-brawls.

My bro’crush on 1970s über-stud James Franciscus has already been well established and this was only solidified more here. Gila Golan was a former “Maiden of Beauty” winner in her adopted homeland of Israel. She continued modeling and received a film contract at Columbia in 1964 -- even though most of her roles were later re-dubbed due to her accent. The blustery Laurence Naismith was a regular on these later Schneer and Harryhausen films, and it’s always fun to see genre vet Richard Carlson running around in one of these things.

Another big plus in most of these Dynamation productions was the music, whose impact is undeniable and is what usually glued everything together -- Mischa Bakaleinikoff bringing the mystery and thunder and weight in those early sci-fi epics, Bernard Herrmann painting an ear-scape of awe and wonder and danger in those fantasy yarns, and now Jerome Morross, whose spirited strings and horn-heavy score of wide open spaces and percussive daring do rivals his work on The Big Country (1958). (You can give a listen here.)

The model for Gwangi itself was about 12-inches high. “The roping sequence was the main reason I wanted to make the picture,” said Harryhausen in his autobiography, An Animated Life. “Actors and horses had to be coordinated to be at a certain point at a precise time to ensure that I could animate the model to fit with their actions. The eye-line had to be spot on all the time they were riding, and to make it all work I had to use several old tricks and a few new ones."

To accomplish this, Harryhausen used what he called a ‘Monster Stick’ to give his actors something to look at during filming. For the rodeo sequence, it was mounted on the back of a jeep that was later taken out during the matting process and replaced with the model dinosaur and their ropes replaced with copper wiring.

Unfortunately, even though he had a whole year for post-production, Harryhausen was still pressed for time with a release date looming, leading to a few short-cuts where certain miniature scenes were not lit properly, explaining why Gwangi and several other dinosaurs appear to change colors throughout the film -- though this was later digitally corrected in later releases on DVD and Blu-Ray. Also, be careful not to dig too deep when looking for background information on your favorite movies because I regret finding out that Gwangi’s distinctive roar was a belching camel run through a filter; and now whenever Gwangi roars all I hear is a damned camel chewing its cud.

On top of the box-office failure, one of Harryhausen's biggest regrets about The Valley of Gwangi was Willis O'Brien would not get proper screen credit for his contributions due to some union hassles. O'Brien did eventually oversee the FX for the similarly themed Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956), where a spat of cattle-rustling turns out to be a forked-tongue Allosaurus, and The Black Scorpion (1957) -- a troubled production, where due to budgetary reasons several attack scenes weren’t animated at all and the producers just went with the footage where the monster hadn’t been matted in yet, and The Giant Behemoth (1959), which was kind of a more sober remake of Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

O’Brien was also initially involved with producer John Beck on a co-production with Toho Studios that eventually saw the light of day as King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) -- a production O’Brien would later disavow.

Somewhat tragically, with the box-office failure of both The Valley of Gwangi and Hammer’s follow up to One Million Years B.C., When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), producers were starting to realize that maybe it was the buxom babes in the fur-bikinis that were the box-office draw and not the dinosaurs. And so, in follow-up features like Creatures the World Forgot (1971) and When Women Had Tails (1973), they kept in the scantily clad women but eschewed the time and expense of any stop-motion dinosaurs for in-camera creatures and stuntmen in sad bear suits. Thus and so, animated dinosaurs would once more become extinct, cinematically speaking, until, for better or for worse, Jurassic Park (1993) brought them back digitally for good.

But thanks to home video and streaming, audiences were finally catching up with The Valley of Gwangi -- though I am continually baffled as to why all those DVD and Blu releases use that alternative art when you have that kick-ass Frank McCarthy painting from one of thee greatest film posters of all time. I loved it so much, I went out and bought one and had it framed.

Again, I know most people think the climactic skeleton battle in Jason and the Argonauts or the Medusa on the hunt in Clash of the Titans (1981) is Harryhausen's masterpiece and the epitome of his craft but, I’m sorry, I gotta go with the team roping of Gwangi. The combination of six actors, six horses, and six ropes is absolutely ah-mazing to watch, and one can only boggle when told the man seldom used calibration tools and did all the movements by memory!

What is it about Harryhausen’s films that compel us to break out the Playdough and make some dinosaurs of our own? But was Gwangi a real dinosaur to begin with? According to the script it was supposed to be an Allosaurus, but his creator often claims it was more of a T-Rex -- or a strange combination of both, which he often referred to as a Tyrannosaurus-Al.

Regardless, whatever species it was, watch and marvel as the animated creature interacts and pulls things away from the live actors, or snatches them off moving horses, and then ponder, just like the rest of us, How in the hell does he do that?!

Well, if you don't know what Hubrisween is by now, Boils and Ghouls, I don't think I can help you. Anyhoo, that's 22 films down with just FOUR yet to go. Up next, The Werewolves of Sturgis.

The Valley of Gwangi (1969) Morningside Productions :: Warner Brothers/Seven Arts / P: Charles H. Schneer / AP: Ray Harryhausen / D: James O'Connolly / W: William Bast / C: Erwin Hillier / E: Henry Richardson / M: Jerome Moross / S: James Franciscus, Gila Golan, Richard Carlson, Laurence Naismith, Gustavo Rojo, Freda Jackson, Dennis Kilbane, Mario De Barros, Curtis Arden

Hubrisween 2020 :: U is for Urban Legend (1998)

2020-10-26T02:45:00.002-05:00

On a deserted stretch of highway on a dark and stormy night, when not nearly forcing oncoming traffic off the road as she weaves between lanes while fiddling with her SUV’s radio, channel surfing between some sex-themed talk radio with “Sasha Under the Covers” and an oldies station, where she finally settles on a song and bellows along as only someone all alone in a car would do when they think they know the lyrics to some pop tune but aren’t even close, Michelle Mancini finally notices she is terminally low on gas.

Pulling into a secluded gas station, as the torrential rain gets even worse, Michelle (Wagner) is a little creeped out by the frazzled looks of the stuttering attendant but hands over her credit card anyway and says to fill it up. (Meanwhile, I am checking the DVD cover to make sure I’m not watching a science fiction feature instead of a horror movie. I mean, a full service gas station? And gas is only $1.14 a gallon? Wow.)

Starting the pump, the twitchy attendant seems to notice something before he hurriedly moves inside to run the card -- only to return a few seconds later, saying there’s a problem and the credit card company is on the phone and needs to talk to the cardholder immediately.

Finding this strange, and the stutterer (Dourif) even stranger, Michelle agrees but grabs her trusty can of mace before following him into the office, where the attendant immediately locks the door behind them. Reading this as she is about to be raped and murdered by this apparent degenerate, Michelle freaks out, and then fights him off as the man moves to restrain her from leaving and tries to say something but can’t due to his handicap, earning him a face-full of mace as the girl wrenches herself free, breaks out a window, and retreats back to her car.

Here, the attendant throws himself in front of the SUV to try and stop her, only to be nearly run over as Michelle punches the gas and streaks away, not hearing the attendant as he finally manages to say what he’d been trying to say all along -- that there’s someone hiding in the backseat of her vehicle!

Alas, Michelle will never know how close she was to almost being saved from the grisly fate in store for her as the undetected passenger, adorned in a hooded winter parka, axe in hand, makes themselves known and separates the girl’s head from her body with one fatal swing.

Meanwhile, back on the campus of Pendleton University, where Michelle was a student -- stress on the “was,” several friends have gathered in a coffee shop, where the most animated of the bunch, Parker Riley (Rosenbaum), regales his girlfriend, Sasha Thomas (Reid) -- of Under the Covers with Sasha fame, and her two friends, Natalie Simon (Witt) and Brenda Bates (Gayheart), with the oft told tale of the Stanley Hall Massacre, where some 25-years ago a professor allegedly went nuts and stabbed an entire floor of co-eds to death before comitting suicide, and how Parker’s fraternity commemorates this event every year with an annual booze-can.

Overhearing all of this, crusading campus reporter Paul Gardener (Leto) says this story is a load of bunk, an urban legend, used to scare freshmen, nothing more, nothing less; even though Parker swears it’s all true and the college covered it up, saying Gardener should get on that instead of covering the latest e-coli outbreak in the cafeteria.

With that, Natalie and Brenda bail but on the way back to the dorms, they pass the dilapidated and boarded up Stanley Hall. And speaking of urban legends, feeling frisky, Brenda wants to pull the Bloody Mary gag, where if you say the witch's name five times out-loud her ghost will appear and foretell your death -- allegedly. This they do, though Natalie is reluctant -- especially when it appears they’ve stirred up something. But it’s only Damon Brooks (Jackson), a campus prankster, screwing with them because he’d like to screw them both.

With that option being a big fat no, Natalie returns to her dorm room, where her roommate from hell, Tosh Guaneri (Harris), is currently screwing her latest hook-up, who screams at Natalie to leave the lights off. She complies, and then does her best to ignore the spectacle going on in the other half of the room -- you get the sense this happens a lot, as an accustomed Natalie crawls into bed, dons her headphones to drown out the cacophony of slapping meat and swapping bodily fluids, and miraculously drifts off to sleep.

The next morning in class, somewhat coincidentally, Professor William Wexler (England) expands his talk on folklore and broaches the very subject of urban legends. And as a practical demonstration, he calls on Brenda to eat some Pop Rocks with a Pepsi chaser, which she refuses to do because she fears her stomach will explode when they mix together just like Mikey, that kid from the old Life Cereal commercial -- who’ll try anything, even though Wexler assures he’s alive and well and living in New Jersey.

Here, Damon steps in, but ever the practical joker, he causes a bit of a minor panic when he fakes a seizure as the volatile concoction foams out of his mouth, much to Wexler’s chagrin. Class dismissed.

By now, word has spread around campus about Michelle’s grisly murder. And while the police suspect the now missing gas station attendant is most likely responsible, the campus newspaper’s headlines scream of a possible homicidal lunatic loose on campus. The byline belongs to Paul, who is a little miffed that Dean Adams (Neville) and his chief of security, Reese Wilson (Devine), are currently confiscating all the papers so as not to cause a panic.

When Paul protests, the Dean warns the only lunatic currently loose on campus is a certain overzealous reporter and to knock any talk of a killer stalking Pendleton right the hell off -- or else. When Brenda, who has the hots for Paul, asks Natalie if she knew the deceased, her friend says no. However, Nat appears shaken by the news as she returns to her room and checks her phone messages -- after kicking Tosh off the phone line, who is none too happy about abandoning her online chat-room. Ah, the days of dial-up internet.

After the beep, Natalie’s mother, having heard about Michelle, wants to know if her daughter is alright. Well, she really isn’t as the girl pulls out an old high school yearbook, which reveals her and Michelle used to be best friends, leaving us to wonder why she would deny even knowing her when Damon shows up out of the blue and apologizes for his lewd behavior the night before, sees something is wrong, and offers that he’s a good listener if Natalie needs to talk.

However, one begins to question the man’s sincerity when he drives Natalie to a lonely and secluded spot deep in the woods to have this talk, where he listens and then tells her about an old girlfriend he had who died after a long battle with cancer, saying how much love he has to give. It’s all a con, though; and Natalie easily detects this end-run of sympathy to get into her pants, calls Damon on his bullshit, and demands to be taken home immediately. And when he tries to press it further, she punches him in the face.

And when he still refuses to take her home, Natalie offers to make it two black-eyes, which finally gets Damon to acquiesce -- only he needs to take a leak first, leaving her behind in the car as he ducks behind a tree, where he lets a few invectives fly about his date as he waters the grass.

Unfortunately for Damon, he doesn’t realize someone in a familiar looking parka has snuck up behind him and gets a noose around his neck, choking him off as he tries to call for help. And is all of this set-up sounding awful familiar to anyone else?

Meantime, back in the car, Natalie yells for Damon to hurry it up until the killer shows himself, marches toward the car, and tries to get in -- only to be thwarted by Natalie, who quickly moves to secure herself in the vehicle. The killer then crawls onto the roof and out of sight, stomps around for a bit, taunts the girl further, and then flees back into the woods. But once he’s gone, a frightened Natalie still hears a strange scraping coming from the roof of the car, panics, slips into the driver’s seat, and tries to get the stubborn car to start, determined to vacate the area with or without Damon.

But unknown to Natalie, this well-worn urban legend is about to come full circle as we cut to outside the car and see Damon is strung up by the neck on a branch from a nearby tree, his windpipe crushed, as his feet struggle to find purchase as they scrape along the roof of the car...

OK, now, a couple years ago I got into the nuts and bolts a bit on what makes an urban legend an urban legend when I reviewed Joshua Zeman’s Killer Legends (2014), a pretty cool documentary, whose purpose was to try and trace several of what has been now foolishly rebranded as “contemporary legends” back to their original “true crime” source. And so, to recap, and we’re gonna stick with the original designation, an urban legend is basically modern folklore that usually had an element of the macabre or an ironic twist to it, grounded in some form of concurrent pop culture, with just a hint of plausibility to keep the gullible hooked enough to keep passing them on by word of mouth from one generation to the next, adapting along as they aged.

And while these oft-told tales were sometimes used as ghost stories, fables, parables or possible explanations for strange occurrences or events (-- like alligators living in the sewer system), they were most often used as cautionary tales that really did happen to a friend of a friend's cousin’s aunt in the town just up the road. And as they aged, they tended to get more explicit, gruesome, and punitive. As a good case in point, let's explore the tale of “The Hook.”

It begins with a young couple parked in a secluded lover’s lane engaged in some premarital necking. And as hormones rage, passions heat up, and a few hickeys are born, the music on the radio is suddenly interrupted by a breaking news bulletin: a mental patient has just escaped from a nearby asylum. And this fugitive has one very distinguishing characteristic: one of his hands is missing and has been replaced with a stainless steel hook -- which he used to murder several people during his breakout.

When the bulletin ends with the authorities encouraging everyone to stay indoors until this lunatic is captured, obviously, the girl is frightened and wants to head home. But the boy, who was 'this close' to getting to second base mere moments ago, scoffs, saying the killer is probably miles away. And as the minutes tick by while they argue about what to do, a sudden scraping outside her door frightens the girl so much the boy finally gives up and drives away. But when they reach her house, there, dangling from the passenger side door handle, hangs a torn-off stainless steel hook covered in blood.

*whew* They made it, and a lesson was learned: boys, keep it in your pants, and ladies, leave your panties on or you will all be killed. Now, the exact origin of this story is not known but it had been circulating since the 1950s, when teenage car culture really became a thing, and then went national when the story was printed as a letter to Dear Abby back in November, 1960.

But after that, the tale began to change or be embellished: the lunatic suddenly became a mad-dog killer, who had escaped from prison. And as I said, things started to get more punitive as one or both of the teenage lovers now met a gruesome end. Later iterations lost the hook angle altogether, where the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere and the boy leaves the girl behind, safe in the car, while he hikes for help and gets killed. Other versions have the same old frustrated sexual encounter, only the boy doesn’t believe the radio announcement, but the girl won’t put out, and he gets out of the car to take a leak before heading home, depending on the teller.

Either way, as the story continues, the girl suddenly hears something scraping on the roof. In some versions, the cops show up and tell her to get out of the car but not to look back and is spared anything further; in others, she finally musters the courage to exit the car and investigate, where the killer is either sitting on the roof, banging the boyfriend’s dismembered head on the hardtop, or the boy’s mutilated body is hanging from a tree and his knuckles or feet were scraping across the roof of the car (-- other deviations have the boy’s blood dripping on the roof). And then, the girl learns too late that this was all just an elaborate ruse to lure her out of the locked car, meaning no survivors this time.

Now, while the makers of the film Urban Legend (1998) would like you to believe that they were the first major motion picture to be based upon or utilize this type of folklore, that is patently false. Horror films had been tapping into the stuff since the Silents, and the Slasher Movie genre, to which Urban Legend belongs, were milking these things dry since the days of Halloween (1978), where babysitters are menaced by an escaped killer, When a Stranger Calls (1979), where the killer was in the house all along and on another extension, and Friday the 13th (1980 and The Burning (1981), which were both loosely based on the urban legend of Cropsey, a mad killer of children, who had a hook for a hand.

Of course, the Slasher cycle had all but petered out by the 1990s but it had a mini-revival with the release of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), which triggered a whole new wave of self-aware mass murder on the big screen, including I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), Lover’s Lane (1999), the unsung Cherry Falls (2000), and Valentine (2001) before cratering again with the Scary Movie spoofs (2000-2013).

And in the middle of all that, of course, came Urban Legend, which began as an idea by Silvio Horta, a recent NYU film school graduate currently working at a Nordstrom’s perfume counter. Horta then pitched this idea to Gina Matthews, who was running a writer’s workshop he had been attending. She thought it had potential, and together, they turned Horta’s idea of an urban legend inspired serial killer into a script and began shopping it around when Scream hit big. It soon drew the attention of Neal Moritz, who had produced I Know What You Did Last Summer and its sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998), who also liked the script’s self-aware notions and agreed to co-produce the feature with Matthews and Michael McDonnell -- now all they needed was some money to produce it with.

But no studios were all that interested until a last ditch effort found a lifeline at the newly formed Phoenix Pictures and Mike Medavoy in late 1997, who was also impressed by the concept and marketability of the copycat killer but felt the script still needed a lot of work before filming could commence. Meantime, Medavoy also appointed Brad Luff as the executive producer of the film, and then Luff and Moritz set out to find Urban Legend a director.

Luff was keenly interested in bringing in Jamie Blanks, an Australian, based on his short thesis film; a horror story called Silent Number (1993), which was his take on the old urban legend of “The Babysitter,” who starts getting strange phone calls on a dark and stormy night from a scared young boy who says he’s trapped somewhere in the dark. And while it turns out in this version the caller wasn’t on an extension inside the house, I won’t spoil the big twist. The short is currently streaming on YouTube, and it is pretty nifty, for those interested in following through.

Now, Moritz was already well aware of Blanks, who was on a short list to direct I Know What You Did Last Summer before losing out to Jim Gillespie. Blanks had even gone so far as to make a mock-trailer for IKWYDLS for his pitch, and Urban Legend would be both his consolation prize and directorial debut as he officially signed onto the production in February, 1998.

Shooting on Urban Legend began on April 20th, 1998, in Toronto, with the University of Toronto subbing-in for the New England based Pendleton College (-- which might look a little familiar as Killer Party (1987) was also shot there), and would need to be completed quickly and efficiently to make a September release date.

The opening sequence, where Michelle gets killed, was filmed first, so Blanks could present a completed sequence to the producers early in the production to assure all they had made the right call by hiring him. However, unlike most Slasher Movies, Blanks wanted to keep the violence implied and not very explicit and practically bloodless -- even though the script called for several gruesome set-pieces, feeling whatever the audience imagined would be ten-times worse than anything he could produce on screen, meaning a shot of Michelle’s severed head bounding down the road to punctuate that opening salvo didn’t make the cut.

Thus, most of the kills relied more on stunt coordinator Matt Birman than special make-up effects supervisor Sid Armour as our killer takes a certain familiar urban legend one step further by rigging the rope Damon is hanging from around the tree, Rube Goldberg style, before tethering it to the rear hitch of his car; so when Natalie finally gets it started and punches the gas, the rope is pulled taut, sending the victim rocketing into the sky, where he ultimately strangles to death.

And when the rope catches, anchoring the car, Natalie jams it into reverse as the killer reappears in front of her, once more stomps on the gas, and backs right up into the tree, turning the car into a paper weight and freeing up enough slack in that rope to send Damon’s body crashing down through the front windshield.

Abandoning the car and fleeing back to campus on foot, losing the killer along the way, Natalie makes it to the security building and tearfully reports to Reese what happened to Damon. But when they return to the scene of the crime, the car and the alleged dead body are gone. In fact, there is no evidence at all that anything -- let alone a crime, has been committed here.

Accused of being on something, an enraged Natalie is insistent that Damon is dead, murdered, and whoever was responsible also attacked her -- maybe the same guy who had killed Michelle! But Reese says that’s not possible because the local police caught the gas station attendant about an hour ago and plan to charge him with Natalie’s murder. With that, Reese pulls the plug and takes Natalie back to campus.

The next day at the coffee shop, a distraught and frustrated Natalie still can’t get anyone to believe her wild tale of what happened last night. Not that something didn’t happen, mind you, but they all feel Natalie was the victim of an elaborate prank put on by Damon, who, Parker points out, was a legendary practical joker -- even using a dummy on several occasions to freak out their pledges. He also points out how the joke resembled an old urban legend -- just as another resembled what happened to Michelle.

Of course, Damon was planning to go out of town that weekend for a ski trip and can’t be reached to confirm any of this, which only adds to Natalie’s escalating paranoia. For not only does she now feel there is a serial killer loose on campus, but a serial killer who might just be targeting her and is making all of those old urban legends a new and deadly reality. And since Reese or the cops won’t do anything about this, Natalie decides to do some amateur sleuthing on her own and heads to the library, where she tracks down The Children's Rainy Day Book of Urban Legends.

At this point, Natalie also realizes she’s not alone in the stacks -- but it’s only Sasha, who tracked down a copy of the Kama Sutra, so she and Parker can try out a few forbidden moves later. Together, they crack open the Urban Legends book and read-up on the two stories related to Michelle and Damon’s death -- variations on “A Killer in the Backseat” and “The Hook.”

Sasha also points out one based on an alleged gang initiation, “High Beams,” where bangers drive around with their headlights off and the first person who flashes them they run off the road and kill. And when Natalie checks the sleeve to see who the last person to check out the book was, turns out it was none other than Damon, meaning it was most likely just a joke after all.

Meantime, back in her dorm room, Goth Girl Tosh is once more on the computer, popping Lithium, and arranging her latest sexual encounter. But when she asks what room they should use to do the deed, the answer is hers as the killer was hiding in her dorm room all along! With that, the killer attacks and they wind up splayed across the victim’s bed.

But as they struggle, salvation seemingly comes when Natalie returns -- only she misreads the scene, mistakes Tosh’s muffled cries for *ahem* something else, leaves the lights off, crawls into bed, and, well, you know the drill.

Come the dawn, Natalie finds a present left for her, scrawled on the wall, written in blood, which reads, Aren’t you glad you left the lights off? And when she pulls back the sheets on her roommate’s bed, Tosh is there, dead, with her wrists slashed open. Seems the Urban Legends Killer got a twofer on this one.

Somewhat unbelievably, Dean Adams intends to write this suspicious tragedy off as a suicide, saying the girl was a manic depressive and the message on the wall was just a morbid farewell note from a disturbed individual. And when Natalie persists with her inspired serial killer theory, the Dean will not hear it. And since she never actually saw anyone else in their room, having averted her eyes the whole time, thinking Tosh was just having sex again, Natalie is once more forced to let it drop.

However, she soon discovers an ally in Paul, who saw her talking with the Dean and Reese and is hoping for a possible scoop. Here, he patiently listens to her story and her theories about what happened to Michelle, Damon, and now Tosh, and how the Urban Legend Killer might just be after her. Paul is sympathetic, but feels it’s a bit of a stretch tying this all together. Maybe the gas station attendant really did kill Michelle; maybe Damon did just pull off a gag; and maybe Tosh did commit suicide. But if they didn’t, Why is the killer striking now? And why her? To answer that, Natalie keeps grasping at even thinner straws, suggesting it might have something to do with it being the 25th anniversary of the Stanley Hall Massacre.

And with that declaration, she officially loses Paul, who intends to prove that notorious event never even happened, once and for all, by taking the girl to the paper’s morgue to show there is no historical documentation of this incident -- only the bound volume with the right date is missing. Luckily, a plot convenient Creepy Janitor (Richings) is working nearby. Asked how long he’s worked at the college, the answer is too long. And when Paul follows that up with questions about Stanley Hall, the janitor pauses, then says to go and ask Wexler.

This they do, only the professor isn’t in his office. And like any good reporter, Paul jimmies the lock and they start snooping and poking around, where they find a lot of circumstantial evidence that Wexler is a tad obsessed with urban legends -- he even owns the same kind of parka the killer wore. The clincher for Natalie, however, is an axe found in the closet; but Paul says it’s not enough and they have to keep digging -- only they can’t, because they just got busted by Wexler as they try to leave.

Brought before the Dean, Adams finally has the excuse he needed to get the troublesome Paul fired off the campus paper before he can write any more stories about Mass Murder U. As for Natalie, well, he’s done a little digging into her personal file and discovered that she was once on probation after a conviction on charges of reckless endangerment. And since Pendleton usually doesn’t accept students with a criminal record, if he hears any more nonsense about a mad killer they will both be expelled with prejudice.

With his journalistic career going down in flames thanks to her, at this point, feeling she is not being totally honest with him, Paul abandons Natalie. She then seeks out Brenda, who is doing laps in the campus pool.

But when she spots someone in the same dreaded parka heading right for her friend, Natalie screams a warning and tries to break-out a window separating them -- but it was all a false alarm as this coated figure was nothing more than another swimmer. (The hell? Did K-Mart have a sale on those damnable things or what?! And an off-season sale at that?! More on this in a sec.)

With her friend mentally fraying before her, Brenda finally gets Natalie calmed down enough to where she at last opens up about her relationship with Michelle, why they were no longer friends, and maybe, just maybe, why someone might be out to get her: Seems back in high school, these two besties were out on the road and Michelle wanted to screw around and turned the headlights off -- just like in that urban legend. And when a passing motorist flashed their lights at them, Michelle whipped their car around and started chasing the other driver. And as she flashed her own lights and blared the horn, the other driver panicked and, fearing for his life, tried to get away from them only to lose control and wrecked his car.

Turns out the other driver died due to their reckless actions; and they got arrested, were convicted, and sentenced to a year of probation (-- she had been accepted to Pendelton before this all happened). Natalie hadn’t spoken to Michelle ever since that night, and even though she wasn’t driving it was her car and she still feels partly responsible for what happened. But, she does feel a little better having finally talked about this; and in an effort to continue cheering her up, Brenda suggests they should head on over to Parker’s frat party and the Annual Stanley Hall Massacre Soiree.

Meantime, Paul is packing up his desk at the newspaper office only to discover the Creepy Janitor has left him a present: a copy of the collegiate paper from 25 years ago, which not only confirms there actually was a mass killing at Stanley Hall but Wexler was the lone survivor! And on top of all that, Dean Adams was the one who covered it all up.

Speaking of the Dean, he’s currently in the campus parking garage chewing Reese out for actually doing her job by following up on the current spike of fatalities at the college. Told in no uncertain terms to quash whatever she finds to preserve Pendelton's reputation, Reese is dismissed, leaving Adams all alone when the killer strikes, who was hiding under his car, giving them an excellent vantage point to slice his achilles tendon in half.

Hobbled, as Adams tries to desperately crawl away, the killer puts his car in neutral, gravity takes over, and the rolling vehicle barrels right over him, impaling the old man onto the one-way, tire-shredding, deterrent spikes.

Meanwhile, Paul tracks down Natalie at the party, shows her the article, and they conclude Wexler is most likely behind the murders. Thinking they should call the cops, Paul says he already tried but Dean Adams headed them off at the pass before he died, informing the authorities to expect all kinds of prank calls about a mad killer on campus and to ignore them; and so, they didn’t believe him. But the question remains, Why is Wexler targeting Natalie and her friends? She has no idea, and the cumulative guilt causes the girl to break down in tears, resulting in an unsolicited reassuring kiss from Paul, which she reciprocates -- just as Brenda finds them.

Knowing Brenda had a thing for Paul, and realizing she’s made a terrible mistake, Natalie runs after her while Paul promises to find some help. But first, he tries to get Parker to end the party and send everyone home for their own safety because there really is a killer loose on campus. But a drunken Parker calls bullshit on that, and accuses Paul of taking a mercenary advantage of the situation to further his own career goals. In fact, to those ends, says Parker, maybe Paul is the killer? Thus, the party continues but without Paul -- or Sasha, who calls her boyfriend out on his loutish behavior before leaving for her shift at the campus radio station.

Meantime, Reese is out patrolling the campus and is drawn to some strange noises in Wexler’s office. And while the office is empty, we do notice that axe we saw earlier is missing, which no doubt might explain away the massive amount of blood on the floor that Reese slips and falls on. And, well, turns out the cops won’t believe her, either, but promise to send the next available unit to the campus, which will take awhile due to a massive storm currently thrashing the area. (Sort of. More on this in a second, too.)

Things kind of accelerate from there as we cut back to the party, where Parker gets a death threat over the phone. Checking the caller ID shows it’s coming from Damon, and so, Parker decides to play along and asks what urban legend has his name on it -- only to be told he’s guessed wrong and the one currently playing out is the one about the old woman who tried to dry off her dog in the microwave. With that, Parker pushes his way into the deserted kitchen, where the microwave has just finished its cycle as he opens the door and finds the grisly remains of his beloved terrier, Hootie.

Sick to his stomach, Parker retreats to the bathroom, where he is accosted by the killer between heaves and gets knocked out. When he comes to, he is restrained to the toilet as his attacker uses a plumber’s helper to force feed him a load of Pop Rocks and caustic drain cleaner, which fatally bursts his stomach.

The Urban Legends Killer then moves to the radio station, where he first kills Sasha’s engineer and cuts the phone lines, which horks the host off because she was about to explain to a caller on how to properly escape the Chinese torture device better known as penis captivus. (I’ll let you all Google that.) Anyhoo, realizing she’s in danger, Sasha leads the killer on a most righteous chase throughout the building but makes the fatal mistake of circling back to where she started instead of finding the nearest exit.

Turns out Sasha was still broadcasting this whole time, too, which was heard by both Natalie and Reese -- the only two who don’t think this was just another prank. Natalie gets there first, just in time to see the killer axe Sasha to death. And after Natalie flees the building, Reese finds the body. And with no other help coming, drawing inspiration from her cinematic hero, Pam Grier, our rent-a-cop decides to take matters into her own hands -- namely, a bigger gun.

Meantime, Natalie runs into Paul, who is missing his usual casual loner jacket and is soaking wet from the rain. He also fails to answer where he's been since they split up. Fearing Parker may have been on to something, Natalie is about to flee again when Brenda arrives, who also heard Sasha getting murdered over the airwaves. Here, Brenda suggests they all go find a working phone and get the real cops here before someone else gets killed.

Thus and so, they all pile into Paul’s Jeep and head into town, stopping at a gas station along the way. And while Paul heads in to use the phone, an awful smell in the vehicle leads the other two to the discovery of Wexler’s mangled body stuffed in the back hatch. This, of course, convinces both Natalie and Brenda that Paul really was the killer all along.

Saying he’s all yours, Brenda flees back toward campus on foot with Natalie right behind her. But as Paul calls after them, they get separated before reaching the campus proper. Here, things really start to get convoluted as Natalie hitches a ride with the Creepy Janitor, who, you guessed it, also owns an incriminating parka to add even more confusion. But this is nipped in the bud pretty quick when Paul’s Jeep roars on seen, forcing them off the road, where the janitor is either knocked out or killed outright.

Back on foot, a dazed Natalie makes it back to campus, finds a security call box, and raises the alarm with Reese. She then hears Brenda screaming for help, and traces her cries to Stanley Hall, where a light is burning on the uppermost floor.

And as those cries for help continue, Natalie doesn’t wait for Reese and breaks into the building on her own, where she discovers the remains of all her friends as she tries to find Brenda -- which she finally does, but was apparently too late as her lifeless body is sprawled across a bed.

But! Turns out this was all a ruse to draw Natalie in close enough so Brenda could sucker punch her friend, knocking Natalie unconscious. And when the girl comes to, she finds herself gagged and restrained to that bed, giving Brenda, the real Urban Legends Killer all along, a captive audience as she gets to monologuing about why she targeted Natalie and killed all of their friends -- complete, quite inexplicably, with an audio/visual assist.

And according to this slide-show, it turns out that guy who died during the hazing incident was the love of Brenda’s life, who also claims they were going to get married before Natalie and Michelle killed him. (Though given her current psychosis, who knows if this is true or Brenda is just some stalker now fixated on Natalie.) As for the others? Well, that was just a case of carpet-bombing to throw off any suspicions as to who the real intended victims were. As to why the urban legends angle? Ah, that was vitally necessary, see, so Brenda could frame oddball Wexler, arranging things to make him look like the killer before suiciding out, so Brenda could have her revenge, get away with it all, and then live happily ever after with her new boyfriend, Paul.

With all the explanations out of the way, Brenda then moves to put the finishing touch on her baroque schemes by pulling off one last urban legend slaying -- this time, the tale of “The Stolen Kidney” -- where some poor dupe gets roofied, wakes up in a tub of ice with a surgical scar short one major organ. Here, Brenda apologizes for the lack of ice or anesthetic. Not to worry, though; Natalie is not destined to survive this procedure anyway. But on the bright side, Brenda says, her victim is destined to live forever by becoming an urban legend herself.

However, Brenda also flunked anatomy, so it might take her a while to find Natalie’s kidney as her scalpel starts probing. But before things get too messy, Reese arrives and orders Brenda to move away from her victim at gunpoint. And once Natalie is freed, Reese tells Brenda to assume the position to be frisked. But then we kinda confirm that Reese just isn’t very good at her job as she failed to find Brenda's switchblade during the pat-down, which she uses to slice open Reese’s abdomen.

And to make matters worse, Brenda beats Natalie to the dropped gun. And while a bullet to the head lacks a certain flare it will just have to do as Natalie pleads with the killer, saying this won’t bring her dead boyfriend back. No, says Brenda. It won’t. But it might win her new boyfriend a Pulitzer. Turns out Paul kinda likes this idea, who applauds as he finally waltzes into the scene. (And how long was he hanging around before making his move?)

He thanks Brenda for her efforts, saying all they need to do now is wrap up a few loose ends and then mop up. His true allegiance is unclear until he asks for the gun, which convinces Brenda she’s gotta shoot them both now. But who to shoot first? Well, she ties to Eeny, meeny, miny it but Reese makes Brenda the mo, having recovered enough to use her back-up piece to shoot the killer -- but not fatally.

This time, Natalie winds up with the gun, who shoots an enraged Brenda multiple times, sending her careening out a window, where she falls several stories to her death. Allegedly.

With the campus phones still out of order due to that off again on again storm, Natalie and Paul once more pile into his Jeep and head back into town to alert the authorities and summon some paramedics for poor Reese. Unfortunately, they forgot they were in a horror movie, meaning they failed to check on Brenda’s body, which explains why she is now in the backseat with an axe.

But this twist is quickly rectified when she brains Paul with the blunt side of the axe, causing him to lose control of the Jeep as she and Natalie struggle over the weapon.

The vehicle then slams into a bridge, coming to a dead-stop, which sends Brenda hurtling through the front windshield, where she falls into the water far below. And as Natalie and Paul watch as her body floats away and then embrace, cut to another campus, where another student wraps up the story of the Mad Campus Killer.

Saying the body of the villain was never recovered, his gathered friends don’t believe him or his story -- save one, who may or may not be a still surviving Brenda, who says this urban legend actually did happen but he told it all wrong. And as a sinister smile purses her lips, the girl settles in to tell it like it really happened as we fade to black.

As Urban Legend first winds down on the drive into town, Natalie and Paul get strangely philosophical given the circumstances of almost getting killed, like, five minutes ago, discussing how what happened will still most likely become an urban legend of some sort. Sure, the facts will be fudged or misconstrued over time, and the actual players will get confused and shuffled around before eventually getting lost to time. But then Paul asks the inevitable: if their tale really was an urban legend going through its birthing process, what will the big twist for their ending be?

Here, director Blanks gives us not one, but two, twists knotting up the end of Urban Legend after revealing and allegedly dispatching the killer, where Brenda is somehow miraculously still alive after taking multiple bullet hits, crashing through a window, and falling three stories only to wind up still kicking in the back of the Jeep. And then the filmmaker double-downs on that first twist by having Wile E. Brenda not only survive all of that nonsense but also prove immune from getting jettisoned out of a car, breaking through a windshield, head first, and falling into a river only to show up in another campus to resume her devious tale.

For many, that second surprise was one twist too many; but thinking on it, Was that second and final coda really a twist at all? For while one could easily read that as nothing more than sequel baiting, I’m not so sure and perhaps we should take it at face value, meaning what we all just watched was nothing more than the faulty recollections of a tale within a tale because, honestly, that’s the only way Urban Legend could possibly work narratively or make any sense at all.

Yeah, this film is kinda chock full of plot-holes and improbabilities that would only work if it was a representation of an over-embellishing narrator. I mean, otherwise, there is no possible way Brenda could’ve pulled-off all of those murder set-pieces alone -- unless she is a work of fiction, allowing the teller to exaggerate her prowess, the gruesomeness of her victim’s demise (-- a bloated Parker appears to have split in half and is now oozing Scrubbing Bubbles), and how she was able to move these bodies around undetected and clean up her crime scenes with such ease?

Sure, these points of contention are all well-ingrained Slasher Tropes that I usually let slide; but unlike those other films, Urban Legend has presented us with an out and a ready made excuse to pave over all those plot-holes and let the film get away with it all. OK, sure, it’s still a twist -- and one could argue it’s a bit of a cheat, where the film itself is just an urban legend, but at least now the film makes a modicum of sense. Hell, that’s a BIG cheat.

Speaking of cheating, but, man, does Blanks like to use cheap musical stings for his jump scares. But he kinda had to as Horta’s script was still pretty weak and leaking badly as it covers the same ground multiple times, even with the built in excuse of “anything goes” since none of this, technically, was happening as I read it and only an unbridled recollection. The attempts at establishing any suspects is pretty abysmal, too, with the only real clue being everyone on campus seems to own the exact same winter parka -- which was strangely out of season.

Apparently, as scripted, the film was supposed to take place during the winter, which was why the killer wore a heavier coat; but when this was changed due to the timing of the shooting schedule, the decision was made to change a climactic blizzard into a massive thunderstorm; but they stuck with the parka because the producers feared a raincoat or slicker would look too much like the killer from I Know What You Did Last Summer. Even if it was a tad anachronistic, I found the killer’s signature look to be one of the best parts of the movie.

And, wow, does Blanks really like to shoot in the rain, except for when he doesn't as the fetishist storm has no consistency as sometimes it's raining and other times it is not during the climax. And I think the director made a tactical mistake of toning down the kills, which could’ve added a little more punch to these proceedings as the only real gore we do get is of the remnants of the poor dog nuked in the microwave.

Now, one must also point out that during the Slasher Revival of the 1990s, to appeal to a certain crowd that normally didn’t go to see these kinds of horror movies, productions tended to raid the casts of angsty teen melodramas currently showing on the WB, UPN, and Fox to headline their product, which gives everything a slick -- and to my eyes, counter-productive, hipster sheen to this particular glut of body count movies. Also, nearly every single character in these were terrible people just begging to be killed.

Both Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Love Hewitt (Party of Five) turned down the role of Natalie, opening the door for Alicia Witt, whom the producers liked because they felt she was against type. Witt made her big screen debut as the little witch girl, Alia, in David Lynch’s Dune (1984), and would later show up on Twin Peaks. She kinda reminds me a bit of Shelley Duvall and brings a lot of salt to the role, rocks the hell out of a turtleneck, and we’re definitely on her side as things hit the fan.

Long before he made an ass out of himself as the Joker in Suicide Squad (2016), Jared Leto (My So Called Life) was cast as Paul because he had a “dark quality” that offset his boy next door good looks. Rebecca Gayheart, meantime, was known mostly for being the Noxema Girl before she started showing up on things like Beverly Hills 90210 and Earth 2. She’s pretty wet as the best friend but sells the hell out of her villainous turn during the climax.

Michael Rosenbaum was just starting out but would go on to carve out a niche as Lex Luthor on Smallville and voice-over work as the Flash in the Justice League cartoon series. Joshua Jackson was just coming off The Mighty Ducks trilogy (1992-1993) and was about to take a long dip in Dawson's Creek. Tara Reid was also a relative newcomer and was a last second replacement for Sarah Michelle Gellar, who had to back out due to scheduling conflicts on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

To help anchor the film and give it some regular genre appeal, the production landed Freddy Kreuger himself, Robert Englund, as the nutty professor, who had temporarily wrapped-up his ongoing nightmare on Elm Street with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) before returning again in Freddy vs. Jason (2003). Also making an uncredited appearance as the gas jockey was the voice of Chucky, Brad Dourif, from the Child’s Play franchise (1998-2017).

And we also got Danielle Harris as the ill-fated Tosh, who played Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989). Apparently, the actress had originally auditioned for the lead role of Natalie, but was instead cast as the roommate from hell. And while these three do bring a ton of horror cred, their roles were really nothing more than glorified drive-bys.

And then there’s Loretta Devine as Reese, the campus cop, who brings an endearing likeability to her character even though she is a bit of a screw-up; first being in lock-step with the Dean, and later getting a little too overzealous as she tries to channel her cinematic hero, Coffy (1973). Funnily enough, Neil Moritz’s father Milt had worked in the publicity department for American International Pictures back in the day and was instrumental in promoting Pam Grier and many of their Blaxploitation pictures, giving him an in to license the footage needed for this film.

When it was released, Urban Legend was ravaged by the critics but made a shit-ton of money -- around $70-million on a $14-million budget. Thus, a sequel was in order, resulting in Urban Legends 2: Final Cut (2000), which moves the action to a film school with the only returning characters being Reese and (maybe) Brenda in a brief, post-credit cameo. This was then followed by a direct to video third installment, Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (2005), which I haven’t had the pleasure of encountering yet.

As for the original Urban Legend from which those sequels sprung? Well, as I’ve stated in earlier reviews, I am a huge Slasher Movie fan who prefers the Whodunits over the Howtheydunits. I remember catching this one on the big screen when it first came out -- one of the last films seen at the old Imperial 3 before I moved to a different town and it was shuttered. Overall it’s an enjoyable enough cinematic excursion if a bit lazy, story wise. Witt is a great Final Girl, and we’re still sympathizing with the cannon fodder. And I’m still up in the air a bit on how to read that ending as either brilliant, sequel bait, or the biggest cheat in Slasher Movie history until, what, Haute Tension (2003) came along?

Well, if you don't know what Hubrisween is by now, Boils and Ghouls, I don't think I can help you. Anyhoo, that's 21 films down with just FIVE more yet to go. Up next, It's Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs in the greatest rodeo round-up of ever!!!

Urban Legend (1998) Phoenix Pictures :: Canal+ Droits Audiovisuels :: Original Film :: TriStar Pictures / EP: Mike Medavoy, Brad Luff / P: Gina Matthews, Michael McDonnell, Neal H. Moritz / AP: Brian Leslie Parker / D: Jamie Blanks / W: Silvio Horta / C: James Chressanthis / E: Jay Cassidy / M: Christopher Young / S: Alicia Witt,Jared Leto, Rebecca Gayheart, Michael Rosenbaum, Loretta Devine, Joshua Jackson, Tara Reid, John Neville, Julian Richings, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Robert Englund, Danielle Harris, Brad Dourif

Hubrisween 2020 :: T is for Target Earth (1954)

2020-10-25T02:46:00.001-05:00

Our film opens with a slow, cosmic pan of our solar system. But then things start to accelerate as we speed toward the third planet from the sun, through the atmosphere, and zero in on a city.

I believe this was supposed to be Chicago, but it's never verified as we continue to zoom in closer; to a street; to a building; and finally, a window, revealing a small apartment behind the glass.

Keeps on moving, the camera does once we switch to inside, where we see a woman sprawled out on the bed before finally settling on an alarm clock, which reads 1:30pm. And while we ponder if this woman is just some lazy late sleeper, we move back to the bed and spy an empty bottle of sleeping pills right beside a prone hand. But despite these clear signs of a suicidal tragedy, the woman stirs, fitfully, and then wakes up, groggy and disoriented, with an enormous headache.

Trying to pull herself together, this woman crawls off the bed and attempts to wash her face, but no water comes out of the spigot. Turns out the lights won't work either -- there's no electricity. Looking out the window, the city streets appear deserted and abnormally quiet for that time of day. Checking on her neighbors, she finds no one home -- but between their door being unlocked and the uneaten food on the table, all evidence shows the occupants must have left in one helluva hurry. But where? And why?

Heading outside, there is still no traffic, no movement, and no signs of life to greet our protagonist; it's also very quiet, too quiet -- he typed ominously, and thinking maybe she did die after all and this is her own version of purgatory, sheer panic starts to overwhelm this poor woman. And as her frantic search intensifies, she rounds a corner and trips over something.

And once she recovers her footing, the girl is shocked to see what she tripped over was the dead body of a woman! Slowly, she backs away from the corpse -- right into a man. And thinking he must be the killer by his proximity, the woman screams and runs away for him. But this mysterious stranger quickly gives chase, determined to catch her before she gets away...

When he was 14-years old, Herman Cohen got his older sister’s help in writing a letter to John H. Thorpe, who was the current Labor Commissioner for the State of Michigan. Seems young Cohen had been working nights at the Dexter Theater in his native Detroit since he was 11, assisting the janitors and guarding the exits for free movie passes for him and his family. Apparently, this was in violation of State Child Labor Laws at the time and Cohen had been caught working after hours on more than one occasion. And so, he intended to plead his case to Thorpe, asking for a special permit to continue working at the theater because, even at that age, Cohen knew working for the movies in some capacity was destined to be a lifelong career choice.

Impressed by the passionate letter, Thorpe delivered Cohen’s permit personally after summoning the boy to a meeting with him and the Superintendent of Detroit’s Board of Education, which allowed him to work until 10pm. Now in the clear, Cohen would often stretch that curfew until well past midnight, seven nights a week, where he graduated from janitor’s assistant to usher, to acting as a gofer for the projectionists, where he learned how to properly run all of the equipment -- in a later interview with Tom Weaver in Double Feature Creature Attack, Cohen recalled how “one operator drank a lot, and I remember that many times I used to get up on a chair and make the changeovers for him on nights when he was drinking too much!"

His first career move came at the age of 18, when he left the Dexter and went to work for the massive, 5000 seat Fox Theater, where he quickly became an assistant manager. After graduation and a stint in the Marines, Cohen moved back to Detroit in 1949 to take care of his ailing mother, landing a job with Columbia Pictures as a sales manager in their Detroit branch. When his mother passed away, Cohen pulled up stakes and moved to Hollywood, using connections he’d made to land a job in Columbia’s publicity department for Lou Smith, who had helped turn Rita Hayworth into a star in the 1940s.

Around this same time, fellow Detroiter Jack Broder decided he wanted to start producing movies. And the germ of this notion began back in 1946, when William Goetz took over Universal and rechristened it Universal International. Wanting to bring more prestige to the brand, Geotz ceased operations on the studios fabled B-unit, which essentially pulled the plug on their comedies, westerns, mysteries, serials, and their long-running horror franchises. And since the studio chief had no interest in Universal’s sizable back catalog, Broder, along with his partner, Joseph Harris, signed a deal with Goetz, leasing the rights to his inventory for the next 10 years, and formed Realart Pictures in 1948, which specialized in rebranding and repackaging these old films as revival double-bills.

These packages were a smash hit, sometimes even out-grossing Universal International’s newer product, and Realart prospered. But not quite enough to suit Broder. Seems theater owners would not pay premium rental prices for reissued films. And seeing a chance to make even more money, Jack Broder Productions was formed to create new product for Realart to distribute. And one of Broder’s first hires was the always opportunistic Cohen, who became Vice-President in Charge of Production.

First up was Curt Siodmak’s Bride of the Gorilla (1951), where a plantation owner (Raymond Burr) is cursed to turn into a hairy beast when the sun goes down, whose production would prove far more interesting than the film itself, including the tragic tale of lead actress and Hollywood Bad Girl, Barbara Payton, who was under contract at Warners but was currently loaned out to Broder as punishment for, and I quote Jack Warner, “@#%*ing everybody on the lot” -- including and not limited to Howard Hughes, Bob Hope, Woody Strode, Guy Madison, George Raft, John Ireland and Steve Cochran.

Currently embroiled in an illicit ménage à trois with actors Tom Neal and Franchot Tone that ended violently shortly after the film was in the can, neither Neal nor Tone, Payton’s fiance at the time, were actually in the film, but well aware of the brewing trouble one of Cohen’s responsibilities was to run interference if both men ever showed up on set at the same time. In the aftermath, it was declared Tone lost the battle but won the whore.

Next was William “One Shot” Beaudine’s Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), which featured the horribly -- make that painfully, unfunny comedy antics of a couple of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis knock-offs, Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, which seemed to ignite Cohen’s life-long obsession with men in monkey-suits.

Money was tight on these productions because Broder was notoriously cheap, and neither Broder nor Cohen really knew what they were doing. But unlike his boss, Cohen was anxious to learn the nuts and bolts of producing and production on films like Two Dollar Bettor (1951), The Basketball Fix (1951), The Bushwhackers (1952), and Battles of Chief Pontiac (1952), absorbing everything he could. But even after taking on more responsibilities, Cohen’s reward at Realart was never a pay bump but a switch in job titles or film credits. Thus, seeing where the money was really being made, Cohen was almost ready to cut ties with Broder, strike out on his own, and make a film for himself.

Now, it was also around this same time that Cohen met and formed a friendship with James Nicholson. Nicholson’s career had kinda mirrored Cohen’s up to this point. A long time lover of science fiction and fantasy, Nicholson started out as an usher at the El Rey Theater in San Francisco and soon graduated to projectionist. From there, he moved around the country, managing theaters in Omaha, Nebraska, where he was shot while being robbed of the box-office receipts. After recovering, he moved to Los Angeles in 1944, where he ran several revival houses with Joseph Moritz, where he showed great skills in promotions and ballyhoo, and eventually purchased the Academy Theater located on Hollywood Boulevard.

But then Nicholson got very sick, and after a lengthy stay in the hospital nearly bankrupted him, he lost his theater. Here, Broder threw him a lifeline and hired the ace promoter on at Realart, where Nicholson became Cohen’s assistant and thrived in the publicity department, showing a talent for coming up with snappy new titles and ad campaigns for all those re-releases. And when Cohen inevitably left Realart, Nicholson was promoted to take his place.

Once on his own, Cohen immediately formed Herman Cohen Productions and struck a three-way deal with Robert Lippert and his Lippert Productions and Nat (no relation) Cohen and his British-based Anglo-Amalgamated to produce a series of low-budget films in London, which Cohen would then distribute in America through Lippert, which included the supernatural thriller Ghost Ship (1952), the spies and intrigue of Undercover Agent (1953), and the crimes and misdemeanors of River Beat (1954). And with all of this cumulative experience, Cohen was finally ready to make a movie all on his own.

Then, in March, 1953, as the legend goes, Cohen and Nicholson met for lunch one fateful day, where they passed a newsstand on North Las Palmas and a certain magazine caught Nicholson’s eye -- or Cohen’s eye, depending on who was telling the tale. Either way, what drew them both to this particular issue of If: Worlds of Science Fiction was a short story by Ivar Jorgenson called The Deadly City.

Jorgenson was a pen name for author Paul Fairman, who had been writing and editing for the pulps since his first short story, Late Rain, was published in the February, 1947, edition of Mammoth Adventure Magazine. His first novel, Invasion from the Deep, came along in 1951, and he was the founding editor for If before switching over to Amazing Stories Magazine, where he stayed until 1958.

Within the raised type of The Deadly City, Fairman weaves us a mystery, which focused on five people -- a suicidal prostitute, a lost traveler, a drunken hooligan, his submissive girlfriend, and an escaped psychopath, who were all left behind for some reason or other in the seemingly abandoned city of Chicago. Where once stood 3.5 million people, now there were only five, moving through the deserted streets, trying to find someone, anyone, else, while trying to figure out what exactly happened here.

But while the grist of this tale is more concerned with the melodrama of the crisis within this small disparate group of people than the tempest without, there is still a sense of foreboding and impending doom in Fairman's prose as to what caused all of this that seems to be circling ever closer -- this was a tale of science fiction after all, which kicks off with a stellar opening prologue, setting the stage for what was to follow when that cause finally revealed itself: “You're all alone in a deserted city. You walk down an empty street, yearning for the sight of one living face -- one moving figure. Then you see a man on a corner and you know your terror has just begun…"

Which is where we came in, as the woman flees for her life from this stranger, who calls after her, promising no harm, until she’s finally cornered in a dead-end alley. Caught, when she becomes hysterical, he resorts to some manhandling (-- rather roughly), and finally has to slap the girl to snap her out of this fit.

Asked why she ran away, her reply is simple: because he's a murderer. The stranger denies this and, talking slowly and calmly, he gets her name, Nora King (Crowley), and rationalizes that he couldn't be the killer until she at last settles down. (If not, I guess you could just slap her silly again, ya big bully.) Introducing himself as Frank Brooks (Denning), he then relates his own tale of woe:

Seems while waiting out a train layover, our traveling salesmen mistakenly flashed a large bank-roll in a bar to the wrong people. A couple of thugs then rolled him after several drinks, knocked him out, and dumped him in an alley, where he didn't wake up until sometime after noon. Nora offers that she, too, woke up late, but doesn't mention the overdose of pills. And now they're together. Alone. Meaning somehow, in the last ten hours, while they were both out of it, the entire city has been evacuated without them.

Frank feels it must’ve been some kind of natural catastrophe, while Nora fears an H-Bomb attack is imminent -- or worse, some kind of germ warfare. But he doesn't think that's very likely; surely an enemy wouldn't give enough advance notice to evacuate this many people before unleashing the gas. Regardless, with all the stray bodies he's come across, Frank feels they face certain death unless they get out of town, too.

And so, quite inexplicably, and counter-intuitively, they head downtown, where they come across an electronics store. Here, Frank stops and breaks in, hoping to find a portable radio and a news broadcast. Once inside, Nora tries the phone but they aren't working either. Finding only one portable radio, this is one too many because there are no batteries to be found. But before they can get too frustrated by this development, the sound of music slowly filters into the store.

Tracing the tune to a nearby nightclub, they find a woman inside playing a piano, who, after finishing the song, and her drink, calls the bartender for a refill. Answering this call, another man pops up from behind the bar with a bottle of champagne. Now, despite the drunken couple's heated bickering, Frank and Nora risk talking to them in hopes of finding out what's been going on. They prove friendly enough, but turns out these two lushes have been on one helluva bender since the night before last; and so, both Jim Wilson (Reeves) and Vicki Harris (Grey) are blissfully unaware that anything has gone wrong and are ecstatic that all the booze is now free.

After Frank gets them up to speed, he suggests they should all head outside the city to safety. But the sozzled couple are more than content to just stay put and drink their way through this supposed apocalypse. Not wanting to leave them behind, Nora suggests they should all hit the famous Club Royal together. Catching on to Nora's plan as Wilson scoffs, saying that joint's five miles outside of town, Frank plays along, offering there are plenty of other drinking establishments for 'pit stops' along the way. With that option, Wilson and Vicki happily agree to a pub-crawl their way toward the city limits and, hopefully, safety.

Outside, they spot an abandoned car -- well, not quite abandoned because the owner is still inside it, dead, with no sign of violence -- just like the woman in the alley. And while the keys are still in the ignition it won't start; and a quick check under the hood finds the distributor cap is missing.

Then suddenly, from out of nowhere, another wretched refugee pops up, who warns all the cars left in the city have been sabotaged that way. Remembering a similar tactic used during the war so enemy combatants couldn’t usurp any abandoned vehicles, Frank and the others keep listening as the shell-shocked Otis (Marshall) describes how he came from the southern part of town, which had been torn apart and razed to the ground, with hundreds if not thousands of casualties amongst the ruins.

But before they can ask who attacked the city, Vicki screams and points to a strange and menacing shadow looming large on a nearby building -- and whatever is casting this silhouette is most definitely not human!

Scrambling to get out of sight, Frank herds them all into a nearby hotel, where they find the lobby littered with newspapers screaming of an INVASION! by unknown forces, which apparently landed just outside the city. Further reading reveals it was the military who ordered the strategic evacuation that missed them all. Meantime, the half-crazed Otis feels they’re not safe and should keep moving; but the others want to hole-up here, regroup, and plan the most effective escape route.

Out-voted, Otis strikes out on his own but doesn’t get very far. No, he barely reaches the street before a large, metallic robot stomps its way outside of the opposite building.

And as the others helplessly watch out the lobby window, the robot zeroes in on his target and fires some kind of death-ray from its large cyclopean eye, which strikes the fleeing Otis, who quickly falls dead. Ordering everyone to flee upstairs, Frank brings up the rear as they all quickly get out of sight before that metal monstrosity, that is most definitely not of this Earth, targets them, too...

And so, just like with Fairman’s short story, turns out our protagonists face an extraterrestrial invasion. On the page, it all began two days prior when a battalion of belligerent aliens landed and leveled half of Michigan. And as they moved south, the military began to evacuate everyone below the Illinois-Missouri border as part of a plan to surround these invaders and keep them trapped against the Great Lakes. Nicholson got first crack at adapting The Deadly City into a screenplay, which Cohen bought off of him for $250.

Changing the title to Target Earth (1954), he then turned the script over to William Raynor and Wyott Ordung, who knew a thing or two about writing screenplays for low budget science fiction films with the likes of Phantom from Space (1953) and Killers from Space (1954) on Raynor’s resume, and Robot Monster (1953) and Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954) lurking on Ordung’s.

And since this was to be Cohen’s first solo film production, he had to scrounge up all the financing on his own, too. To that end, he took his spec-script and a proposed budget of $100,000 to Walter Mirisch and Steve Broidy, who had just rebranded the old Monogram Studio as Allied Artists in an attempt to elevate them out of Poverty Row status. And this strategy had worked with the release of what Mirisch called B-Plus pictures as budgets expanded for their top bills, including color film stuck, but they still needed dirt-cheap product to fill the bottom bills like Target Earth.

Liking Cohen’s enthusiastic pitch, Allied Artists agreed to fund half of the film’s budget if the young producer could match the amount. With that, Cohen flew to New York for a meeting with Alan Freidman, the head of Deluxe Labs, who agreed to put up the other half of the money and cover the costs of the prints until the film went into circulation. However, despite this success, which allowed the picture to go into production, money was still very tight and a lot of compromises were made for a tale about a group of people caught in the crossfire between unstoppable robotic invaders and the U.S. military.

We’ve already seen one sterling example of how talking is cheaper than action as we never see the invasion -- which we get second hand as our hero reads it verbatim from a newspaper, nor the aftermath of the alien’s devastating attack -- just a first hand account by a rather convenient plot device, Otis, who doesn’t last long after taking his plot dump.

And this tell don’t show trend continued as we cut away from the hotel to the forward HQ of the gathered military, where we find out they really don’t know much more than our refugees. The running consensus is these rampaging robots are of extraterrestrial origin -- and probably from Venus. And after an entire crack airborne division was completely slaughtered by these Venusian automatons (-- once more completely off-screen, *yawn*), General Wood (Space), who's in charge of this operation, changes strategies and calls in an air-strike. (Cue the stock footage!)

Back at the hotel in their commandeered suite, the noise of the attack bombers draws everyone's attention to the window, raising fears they might be sitting on ground zero. But, before a single bomb can be dropped on them, that alien death-ray sweeps the sky clean.

Twice witnessing these awesome destructive capabilities, our stalwart group tries to plan their next move until they slowly realize here is no move to make: they came from the north; Otis came from the south; the aliens landed to the east; and the Air Force just got obliterated coming from the west; thus, they're completely surrunded by the enemy with no means of escape.

Finding this situation rather ironic, Nora says yesterday she wouldn't have cared about dying today. When asked to explain, she confesses to her failed suicide attempt. Turns out Frank had suspected as much, and then asks if she's changed her mind about not having any reason to live. She says yes, and they both exchange a smile. Yep. She's fallen for the big lug-nut -- and I don't mean the robot!

Back at army HQ, General Wood receives word that the atomic field-artillery pieces have finally arrived; but it will take some time to get them operational before they can, hopefully, bloody the invaders’ noses a bit. Obviously, the General doesn't like using atomic weapons on American soil but he has little choice in the matter because nothing else seems to be working. And knowing full well his beleaguered forces can't hold the line much longer, allowing the enemy to break out of the city, Wood is about to sign the order to fire-when-ready just as word comes they've finally captured one of the invaders!

Here, Wood is told his P.O.W. is just a robot, and not some alien encased in body-armor. Completing his initial examination on the defunct machine, the head scientist (Bissel) sadly concludes the only reason they caught this one is because it most likely malfunctioned somehow, with the only visible damage being a cracked faceplate.

Even a cursory look at the robot's exterior shows that it's far beyond our own terrestrial technology (-- I know, just roll with it). Further deduction shows it must be remote-controlled by electromagnetic impulses keyed to a cathode-ray tube socked somewheres inside the head piece, which proves out when further study of the "corpse" reveals the tube which processed these control signals somehow broke, rendering it useless. (Cheap Venusian crap!)

Thus, the gathered experts try to determine how far away the transmitting aliens could be, hoping to triangulate the source signal, and then wipe it out. Not as easy as it sounds for they can find no attanae, meaning they could be anywhere -- even back on Venus. Stll, Wood takes this as a good sign; the seemingly invincible invaders can be stopped. But the scientists remind him that the robots are still bullet proof, so another frontal attack would be just as fruitless as the last until they figure out what cracked that tube.

Later, at the hotel, after scrounging some food and candles, the two couples spread out a bit, allowing Nora to confess to Frank as to why she tried to kill herself. Seems she and her husband were involved in a car crash six months ago. They were arguing over something stupid. She survived. He didn’t, and the guilt and loneliness finally caught up with her last night. Assuring this wasn't her fault, Frank encourages Nora to get some rest.

Indubitably, since this is the 1950s, Vicki and Nora will tak the bedroom while Frank and Wilson sack out in the living area. But come the dawn, Nora hears someone trying to break in and screams. Alerted, the men try to hold the door but two gunshots convince them to open up, revealing a very greasy-looking assailant named Davis (Roark).

Assuming he's a looter, the intruder claims valuables aren't what he's after and turns a lecherous eye toward the women. Bullying his way inside, Davis takes them all hostage and constantly reminds them he's in charge because of the gun, which Vicki notes sure looks like a standard police revolver.

Ignoring her, he follows Nora into the kitchen area and tries to get friendly, saying she can be safe with him or be dead like the others. Yeah, it seems Davis plans to use them all as decoys, bait, to lure the robots away so he can sneak into the sewers and then walk under the enemy to safety scot free. Nora counter offers with a slap across the face, calling him crazy. With that, Davis just shrugs off this rejection, and then forces everyone down to the lobby.

Meanwhile, with the clock ticking down, General Wood opens this latest scientific briefing with a plea, saying this will be the last chance to give him a non-nuclear solution. With about five minutes left before the missiles are fired, the head technician starts cranking up an oscillator, bombarding the captured robot's head with sonic waves. And while the metal casing does begin to vibrate, the electronic innards stubbornly refuse to break. Desperate, they crank up the volume even further.

Things are also reaching a crucible back at the hotel, where Davis is threatening to shoot Wilson since Vicki refuses to check outside for any robots. When she at last concedes, the hostage spots one down the street, heading away from the hotel. Then, when Vicki finally recognizes Davis as a convicted killer, the creep cops to murdering a guard and stealing his gun during the evacuation before revealing his plan of using them all as bait.

But Wilson refuses to be his pigeon, and Vicki concurs, saying there are four of them and one is bound to get him -- and the whole thing is moot anyway, she says, because he hasn’t got the guts to shoot. (I pause to remind you, m'dear, that he has killed several people already!)

With that, Davis shoots Vicki dead. (I warned ya!) Then Frank lunges at him, and takes a bullet in the arm, giving Wilson the opening he needs to get a hold of the little creep and strangle him to death.

Alas, all that noise has alerted the robot to their presence; and as it crashes through the window, Wilson empties the revolver with no effect.

When the robot counters with its death-ray, our dwindling group retreats back up the steps, where they are chased all the way up to the roof (-- well, give him a second, Mr. Clunky-Pants is having some trouble negotiating those steps).

And while Wilson tries to hold it off at the door, the others try to find another way down. No go; they're stuck.

And after the robot bursts through the door, it blasts Wilson dead and then closes in on Frank and Nora!

Trapped for good this time, Frank embraces the girl and they wait for the end, together. But salvation comes when the air is pierced with a strange, high-pitched shriek. Then, the robot starts to falter as the noise gets closer.

Looking over the side, the couple spots a convoy of army jeeps mounted with loudspeakers moving down the street. And when the robot finally keels over and fritzes-out for good, Frank signals the convoy and they stop.

Asked if they know they're in a live combat zone, Frank gives them the quick version of their predicament, and then asks what that noise was. A Captain explains it's an oscillator, and the sound vibrations are disrupting the inner workings of the robots, knocking them out and rendering them useless.

Nora asks if it's over, then. To which the Captain replies, yes, they've stopped them -- this time! And they were lucky, too: for if the cathode-ray tubes were made out of the same metal as their armor, then all the oscillators in the world would’ve been useless. (I wouldn't say that very loud, amigo.) But he assures Nora not to worry, though, because their top scientists are already working on how to counteract that variable even as they speak. He then tells them to pile in and they'll get Frank to a medic. And after the oscillator cranks back up, sending out the world saving signal once again, they head for home.

One of the biggest changes that Cohen, Raynor and Ordung made to Fairmont's original story was subbing in those lethal, remote-controlled robots for the alien invaders. There were no robots at all in the story, and Fairman does better when his extraterrestrial menace is kept to the shadows and all our protagonists hear is a melancholy howl, or “a high, thin whine -- a wordless vibration of eloquence” that “needled out of the darkness and into their ears” as it echoed along the empty canyons of the abandoned city, where it was answered and amplified all around them.

It’s rather chilling on the page, and for something that could’ve been pulled off rather easily and cheaply on film it’s surprising this aspect wasn’t exploited further in Cohen's adaptation. Then, all of this atmosphere in the story is kinda ruined during the climax when the aliens are finally revealed: Humanoid in shape, honestly, Fairmont kinda drops the ball, here, as he doesn’t do much more to describe them beyond being rather thin and gangly, with a rudimentary description of the advanced weapons they carry. And to make matters even worse, the aliens are not defeated through military cunning or ingenuity but simply drop dead all at once with the barest of nods that they probably couldn’t adjust to something in our atmosphere.

Which leads to the other major change made in the script, where the film cashes in on the burgeoning invasion by the “other” / Red Scare tropes of vigilance and paranoia of the 1950s, where our protagonists face off against something both inhuman and indestructible, with no fear or feeling, who will not stop until we and our way of life has been subjugated or obliterated. But fear not, because good old American know-how combined with American military might will always be there to save the day. But! As the soldier warns in the denouement, we must always be prepared and ever vigilant, because those Commies -- sorry, those aliens will inevitably be back.

Beyond that the movie stays fairly faithful to the story, whose true focus is on the characters and the rightful climax is when Wilson strangles Davis to death after he murders Vicki -- the alien invasion is basically just a framing device. There were a few minor changes to the characters, too, with Nora going through the biggest overhaul, changing her from a bitter prostitute to a lonely widower. In the story, when things get desperate and Frank and Nora look to each other for comfort, there are thoughts of marriage if they get out of this alive, which quickly dissipate once the crisis has passed. However, it does end cryptically, so a happy ending might be in order after all. In the film adaptation, there is no question our newly minted couple are in it together for the long haul.

Still, we do have some pretty atypical characters for this kind of genre piece: a heroine who tried to commit suicide; a hero who doesn't have all the answers -- and in point of fact, leads them into danger instead of out it; and the other two protagonists are both raging alcoholics. The late entry of the armed killer seemed a little forced, and works better in the short story because he’s introduced a lot earlier; but I guess they had to get them out of that hotel room somehow.

And the cast pulling them off is rock solid with future genre stalwarts Richard Denning -- Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Day the World Ended (1955), Kathleen Crowley -- The Flame Barrier (1958), Curse of the Undead (1959), and Virginia Grey -- Unknown Island (1948), Black Zoo (1963), anchoring things nicely. And it should be noted the one weak-link, Robert Roark, who played the creep, was the son of one of those financiers, which explains ah-lot.

As for the FX, I would qualify them as cheap but surprisingly effective even though they were under-utilized. Sure, upon first glance the refrigerator-box frame and spare air-duct parts origin of the arms and legs of the invaders war machines are hard to overlook, but if you can manage to get past all that and notice the Venusian robot's squat nature and odd body proportions, you realize it doesn't necessarily scream out, "Hey, look, there's a guy in a robot suit!"

Here is also where the adaptation breaks down a bit with the robot itself. I mean, these aliens have the technology to build these nearly indestructible machines, transport them to Earth, and can control them all the way from Venus, but their technology is still based on glass tubes and transistors? Ho-kay?!

Designed and constructed by David Koehler, the suit was worn by Steve Calvert, who also played the gorillas in both of Cohen's earlier films -- in fact, Calvert's entire career consisted of playing gorillas and other strange beasties in things ranging from Mark of the Gorilla (1950) to The Bride and the Beast (1958). And at some point you probably also noticed that we never see more than one of these automatons in action at a time. Well, there's a good reason for that, too.

See, with such a meager budget, Koehler was only able to mass produce one robot suit, and that's why we never see the advancing robot army -- just the "advanced scout." Most of everything else, combat wise, is never shown but recounted. And what little we do get to see is sourced from stock-footage -- most notably when the jets are wiped out. In the story they are hit by a beam of “blue fire” and disintegrate into atoms. In the film, more recycled footage and a quick optical.

To make all of this come together, Cohen hired Sherman Rose to both direct and edit the picture. Rose was a well-heeled editor at the time in both film and TV, including cutting a couple of pictures for Broder at Realart. Target Earth would be his directorial debut. Rose also worked in tandem with his wife, Kay, who would serve as the sound designer on the film, and Target Earth would be her first onscreen credit.

Sherman Rose would direct just two more features before sliding back into the editing booth, while Kay Rose would continue to work in sound and had quite the prolific career, working on things ranging from Roger Corman’s The Comedy of Terrors (1963), to Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), to Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon (1973), while eventually winning an Academy Award for Sound Design on Mark Rydell’s The River (1984). And she had such an impact in the field, in October, 2002, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg endowed the Kay Rose Chair in the Art of Sound and Dialogue Editing at the School of Cinema-Television, USC.

All the interior scenes for Target Earth were shot at the old Charlie Chaplin studios, while the exteriors were filmed on the streets of Los Angeles over several weekends, very early in the morning, without permission or permits, when everyone else was still asleep and the streets were empty. In that same interview with Weaver, Cohen later related how one shot was ruined when a church service ended and the congregation poured out onto the street in the middle of a take. But despite all of these limitations and difficulties, both Rose and Cohen got the film done in about eight shooting days and brought it in under budget for $85,000.

When Target Earth and Cohen’s follow up feature, Magnificent Roughnecks (1956) -- also directed by Rose, became modest hits for Allied Artists, when compared to their budgets, mind you, the producer, still in his 20s, soon drew attention from Max Goldstein at United Artists, who quickly signed him to a four picture deal. Cohen had little input on what these pictures would be as he was essentially a gun for hire. And so, he was assigned a couple of westerns, The Brass Legend (1955) and Fury at Showdown (1957), a musical comedy, Dance with Me, Henry (1956), which would be the last time Abbott and Costello would appear together on film, and a film noir, Crimes of Passion (1957), which received glowing reviews from the critics but absolutely fizzled at the box office.

Disappointed with these returns and disenchanted with the lack of choice and studio strings attached to his productions, when his contract ran out Cohen was anxious to go back into business for himself again. Needing to do a picture fast to stay relevant, Cohen wound up getting an offer from his old friend, James Nicholson. See, since Cohen had left Realart, Nicholson also aspired to leave and produce his own films. He talked to Cohen about forming an independent production company together but his friend had just signed on with UA, making him under contract and unavailable.

And then came that fateful day when Alex Gordon, Edward D. Wood Jr., and Gordon’s lawyer, Samuel Z. Arkoff, marched into Broder’s office, threatening him with legal action over stealing a title from one of Gordon and Wood’s proposed scripts, The Atomic Monster -- later filmed as Bride of the Monster (1955), and slapping it onto a re-release of the Lon Chaney Jr. vehicle, Man Made Monster (1941).

Here, Nicholson was impressed that Arkoff managed to secure a settlement from the notorious tightwad Broder and soon stuck up a friendship, which eventually led to a partnership and the formation of American Releasing Corporation (ARC) in 1954, which later morphed into American International Pictures (AIP), when the little studio that could really got to rolling in the mid-1950s. And one of the films that really put them on the map was Cohen’s first production for them, I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). But that, Boils and Ghouls, is another kooky tale for another full moon.

As for Target Earth? Well, I liked it a whole bunch despite its flaws. Like the source story, it starts really strong with a sense of desperate isolation -- so much so it borders on desolation despite the fact everything is still standing. Admittedly, it does fall apart in the third act a little, but it still works for me. Why? Well, that's easy:

I love vintage sci-fi movies with big clunky robots in them. I also like cosmic death-rays blowing things up; and square-jawed heroes who can think fast and use their fists; and I like pretty heroines who do more than scream and can handle themselves when shit goes down; and I really, really like it when the army comes to the rescue in the end and kicks a modicum of alien butt before the closing credits roll. Thus, I think Target Earth overachieves well past its budget limitations with a minimalist, no-nonsense approach that would become a staple for Herman Cohen’s entire career.

Well, if you don't know what Hubrisween is by now, Boils and Ghouls, I don't think I can help you. Anyhoo, that's 20 films down with SIX yet to go. Up next, Stop me if you've heard this one before but it happened to a friend of my cousin's cousin's uncle who swears it's all true...

Target Earth (1954) Abtcon Pictures :: Herman Cohen Productions :: Allied Artists / P: Herman Cohen / D: Sherman A. Rose / W: William Raynor, James H. Nicholson, Wyott Ordung, Paul W. Fairman (Short Story) / C: Guy Roe / E: Sherman A. Rose / M: Paul Dunlop / S: Richard Denning, Kathleen Crowley, Virginia Grey, Richard Reeves, Robert Roark, Mort Marshall, Arthur Space, Whit Bissell

Hubrisween 2020 :: S is for Shock Waves (1977)

2020-10-24T01:29:00.003-05:00

We open with a brief history lesson, where we learn that in this timeline, shortly before the start of World War II, the German High Command began an extensive covert operation to investigate further into the occult and the supernatural, focusing on the ancient Teutonic folklore that told of a race of warriors who used neither weapons nor shields, and whose preternatural powers were supposedly drawn from within the Earth itself.

And as war finally broke out, quickly escalated, and then turned against Germany, caught between the Allies and the Russian Army, the Nazi Schutzstaffel (better known as the SS) secretly recruited a group of scientists to create an invincible soldier to help turn the tide, who began experimenting on the bodies of those killed in battle. Thus, in a secret laboratory near Koblenz, these cadavers were used in a variety of … experiments.

Now, as this history lesson ends, it’s long been rumored that as the Third Reich collapsed, and Germany’s borders were breached, Allied forces started encountering fanatical terror squads that fought ferociously with no weapons and killed only with their bare hands. No one knows who or what they were, where they came from, or what became of them after Germany finally surrendered. But one thing was for certain: of all the German SS units, there was only one the Allies never captured a single member of.

Next, we cut to the present day (circa 1977) somewhere in the waters just off the Bahamas, where a local fisherman and his son find a small boat cast adrift on the open sea. Finding only one lone occupant, a woman, parched and sunburned, slipping in and out of consciousness, the fisherman brings her aboard his own boat, treats her as best he can, and asks how she came to be in such a predicament as they putter back to the harbor and proper medical care. Slowly, this obviously traumatized and delirious woman tries to come around, and then starts to relate her harrowing and unbelievable tale of woe and terror:

Our survivor’s name is Rose (Adams), and as her flashback begins we once more find the girl in the water -- sans boat, having a relaxing swim in the clear blue Caribbean water. One of four passengers booked aboard the Bonaventure -- a small chartered cabin-cruiser, which has, for the second time in as many days, developed engine trouble, Rose took the opportunity for a refreshing swim while waiting out the repairs.

Meanwhile, the Bonaventure’s curmudgeonly skipper, Captain Ben Morris (Carradine), is giving his first mate, Keith (Haplin), all kinds of hell on both his mechanical skills and navigational abilities. But as the engine begrudgingly groans back to life, unbeknownst to our pleasure cruisers, something sinister is afoot just beneath the waves several leagues away -- well, if the sudden ominous music sting is to be believed.

But this change in tone is somewhat confirmed -- or at least reinforced, when we spy a half-sunken freighter lurking nearby; and judging by all the corrosion, it appears to have been there for awhile. But if you listen close, somewhere below the waterline, you can hear some kind of rhythmic pounding; almost as if something was stuck inside this rusted-out hulk, something that was desperately trying to get out.

Then, the afternoon sky suddenly shifts to a deadly shade of Orange Fizz, causing the ship’s radio and compass to go on the fritz (-- making me believe they’re somewhere in the dreaded Bermuda Triangle, though the movie never confirms this). Here, stating the obvious, Captain Ben orders Keith to get them the hell out of there -- and fast.

Later, once the old tub is clear of the ethereal light show, we finally get around to meeting the rest of the passengers as they gather in the galley and wait for Dobbs (Stout), the ship’s slovenly cook and only other hand, to bring out the food. Here, Norman (Davidson, a dead-ringer for Buck Henry), once again complains to Captain Ben about the derelict condition of his boat, which was oversold a bit in the brochure, I’m guessing. And when you couple the mechanical failures with all the other strange things going on, the surly passenger demands to be returned to port, any port, before they inevitably sink.

And as her husband continues to rant, all Norman’s wife, Beverly (Sidney), can do is roll her eyes in a long-suffering fashion, just as the Old Salt snaps back, asking what a used car-salesman from Cleveland would know about boats anyway, entrenching both the skipper’s and Norman’s assholishness even further (-- so much so, I’d be surprised if either of them made it past the second reel.)

But then Chuck (Buch), another passenger, interrupts them, wanting to ask the captain for his opinion on all those strange lights in the sky and the tales of ghost ships and sea monsters that Dobbs has been filling these land-lubbers heads with ever since they first cast off. Told in no uncertain terms that Dobbs is completely full of shit, Captain Ben excuses himself. Once he’s gone, Norman’s call for a mutiny is quickly laughed off by the other passengers.

Later that evening, while everyone else sleeps, Rose visits the bridge for a smoke, where Keith is standing watch. And as these two get to talking, Keith admits that for all intents and purposes the Bonaventure is hopelessly lost; and with all of their electronic equipment no longer working, and the damnable compass still moving in a wobbly circle, this dire situation is unlikely to remedy itself anytime soon. And as if this situation weren’t bad enough already, suddenly, a ghostly freighter appears out of the darkness on a direct collision course!

But Keith takes the wheel and manages to minimize the impact as the rogue freighter only scrapes the side of the Bonaventure -- but it's enough of a jolt to wake everyone else up. But by the time the rest all get topside, the phantom freighter has up and disappeared, explaining why Captain Ben doesn’t believe Keith or Rose and figures his idiot underling fell asleep at the wheel and ran them aground.

Shooting off a flare to assess the damage, the phosphorescent glow illuminates that half-sunken derelict off the starboard bow. (Or maybe the port side? That’s me shrugging, as I know less about boats than a used car salesman from Cleveland.) That couldn’t be the boat that hit them? Could it? (Cue the Twilight Zone music!)

As day breaks, the others soon realize that Captain Ben has disappeared. All they can find of him are his discarded clothes (-- which means, wherever he is, John Carradine is buck-ass naked! Noodle that for a bit, Boils and Ghouls!) And as the rest of the crew checks for damage, they confirm that last night’s eerie close encounter finds them stuck on a reef. Worse yet, the bottom of the boat has been split open, meaning when the tide comes in the Bonaventure will definitely capsize and sink.

With no other recourse, the decision is made to abandon ship and start ferrying the passengers over to a nearby island with the Bonaventure’s dinghy, which is so small it will require several trips. Thus, while bringing the last load over, the unlucky passengers finally find Captain Ben -- through the glass porthole in the bottom of the boat as he floats by, drowned and definitely dead.

Once everyone else is safely ashore, Chuck climbs a tree, gets the lay of the land, and is happily surprised to spot some buildings about a half-a-mile inland. And after making their way through the swampy lagoon and the dense jungle, our castaways discover those buildings were part of an old hotel and resort that appears long abandoned.

Here, the group splits up and starts exploring. Dobbs and Chuck find the kitchen, where they poke around for a bit. They also find an aquarium -- and since the fish inside it appear pretty healthy, that can only mean one thing: they’re not alone here.

Then, almost on cue, the air is suddenly filled with the bombastic sound of Richard Wagner. Drawn to the source of the music, our group congregates in the main hall and slowly surrounds an old Victrola. When the record winds down, a voice with a slight Germanic accent calls from the shadows, asking, What are they doing here?

And after a few more cryptic questions, our refugees explain their predicament. But when Keith mentions they were hit by a freighter, the man behind the mysterious voice finally shows himself and demands to know the name of that ship.

Told it was the Proto-something-or-other, when the German (Cushing) verifies it was The Praetorious, he quickly disappears into the shadows again. Unable to find him, after having a long and taxing day, the stranded boaters pack it in, pick out a room, settle in for the night, and will continue their search in the morning and, hopefully, find a way off this island.

Meanwhile, back in the water, in that rusted-out derelict, something has finally broken out of the hold and are now moving freely about on the ocean floor, gradually circling ever-closer toward the island, where I believe our unwitting castaways are about to find out what exactly happened to that missing SS unit...

A native of Queens, New York, Ken Wiederhorn attended Kenyon College in Ohio until he dropped out during his sophomore year, moved back home, and got a job as a mail boy at the CBS Television Network, where he quickly worked his way up from the mailroom to a gopher in the newsroom, to an editor, and, eventually, an associate producer for the network’s documentary news series, CBS Reports.

Meantime, according to an interview on the Master Cylinder website, it was while still working as an assistant editor at CBS when Wiederhorn decided to go back to school. Seems a documentary filmmaker he had worked with had just been appointed head of the film department at Columbia University, who was able to shepherd him into the program. Here, Wiederhorn struck up a friendship with fellow film student, Reuben Trane; and together, they collaborated on a short film for their senior thesis, Manhattan Melody (1973), which earned them the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ inaugural Student Film Award. “Don’t call it an Oscar,” Wiederhorn later clarified. “It was more of a block of wood with a name-holder on it."

After graduating, Wiederhorn continued to work at CBS while Trane moved back home to Miami, Florida, where he started teaching a filmmaking course at Florida International University. All the while, Trane nursed a notion to take the next step and finally reached out to Wiederhorn to see if he wanted to collaborate again -- this time on a low-budget feature film. He did. And so, Trane looked to his family for financial backing, who had made a fortune in the heating and cooling business since creating the Trane Comfort Corps back in 1913. And they agreed to back Reuben’s efforts to the tune of $200,000.

As for the subject matter, it was quickly decided by Trane to follow the same path as many other independent productions before them, meaning an exploitation film or a horror movie were in order because it would be easier to sell, make their money back, and hopefully open a few doors to make something a little more ambitious later. In a 1975 interview with The Miami Herald, Wiederhorn commented on how horror was the only genre left for which there was a built-in market. Plus, “No matter how bad they are, horror movies make money,” Trane added.

Thus, the two formed a production company, and the first order of business was to get a script written. And for that, Wiederhorn, who freely admitted he wasn’t a fan of the genre, teamed up with John Harrison. Drawing inspiration from the Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier exposé, The Morning of the Magicians, one of the first books to explore The Thule Society and the Nazi party’s fascination with the occult and the supernatural, which led them to the idea of the German high command resurrecting dead soldiers through some dubious alchemy and turning them into a zombie attack squad.

By now, the decision had been made to shoot in Florida, with an inexpensive crew made up of Trane’s eager students; and since Trane was also good with boats, the ocean became a story element. And with that, Wiederhorn suddenly had the hilarious notion of a battalion of these Nazi zombies invading Miami Beach. And then, with the “help of a few more joints” their script really started taking shape, turning those undead Nazis into aquatic zombies -- a unique twist, which beat Fulci to the punch by over four years, who could move freely underwater, stalking the ocean floor, from which they terrorize a group of stranded tourists on some uncharted desert isle.

And so, the fledgling production company was rebranded as Zopix (-- Zombie Picture, get it?), and with the script finally finished, shooting was almost ready to commence. Trane would serve as producer and cinematographer on dry-land, Wiederhorn would direct, and Irving Pare would handle the underwater scenes. Also on board as the production's still photographer and production assistant, was future sleaze merchant Fred Olen Ray, who, like the others, was working on his first feature. And in an interest to save money, the decision was made to shoot the film in 16mm with the intent to blow it up to 35mm once (and if) they found a distributor for their film, which was shot under the title, Death Corps.

To add some weight to the marquee and hopefully overcompensate for their own inexperience, both Wiederhorn and Trane knew they needed to get a couple of genre vets to anchor the film. Money was tight, but they stretched it out a bit by relegating each star to only one half of the movie. Both John Carradine and Peter Cushing worked for five days each on the film for the sum of $5000 a piece -- though Cushing also demanded and received first class air travel and accommodations.

Apparently, according to several after action reports, Carradine, working on his 450th feature, was a bit of a grumpus, nearly drowning while filming his death scene in the Trane swimming pool, and was happy to be killed off early.

Cushing, on the other hand, was always the gentlemen, always prepared, and always willing to help out these novice filmmakers with suggestions on camera placements or character movements, which was much appreciated.

“A lot of times Cushing had a better idea of what we wanted than we did,” said Wiederhorn. The British actor was also fascinated with a certain American Institution -- the International House of Pancakes, and began each day by eating a stack of wheat cakes at the IHOP.

As for the rest of the cast, Brooke Adams was signed up in New York. This would be her first starring role, and she was about to break out a bit in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) and Philip Kaufman’s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). The rest of the small cast were recruited locally in Miami and the surrounding area, including Luke Halpin, whom we old farts will remember as Sandy Ricks from the old Flipper TV-series.

But the production’s biggest coup was probably securing the use of the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables. An old luxury resort first built back in 1924, it had served Presidents, movie stars, and notorious gangsters -- before he became Tarzan, Johnny Weismuller served as a swimming instructor there, teaching Al Capone’s son how to swim. When World War II broke out, the Biltmore was converted into an army hospital, and it remained a veteran’s facility until 1968, when it was shut down -- more like abandoned, shuttered, and sold off to the city.

And there it sat -- along with its sister hotel in Palm Beach, empty and unoccupied, until Wiederhorn and Trane managed to coax the owner, John D. MacArthur, the city fathers and “the powers that be” into letting them film in both locations for $250 a day.

Of course, the hotels had no power or plumbing. And with only one Winnebago on set with only one working restroom meant a lot of the toilets were used anyway, causing the production to move deeper and deeper into the hotel to get away from the smell as things dragged on. After filming wrapped, the property remained dormant until a massive restoration in the mid-1980s saw the Biltmore reopened and returned to its original grandeur.

They were also able to get some cheap production values with the wreck of the SS Sapona, a concrete cargo steamer that ran aground near Bimini during a hurricane in 1926, which served as the Nazi-zombies base of operations.

And for the beaches, jungles and swamps they used the mucklands of Matheson Hammock Park in Coral Gables and Crandon Park Beach in Key Biscayne. “I personally really hated the locations because they were really difficult to work in terms of physical comfort,” said Wiederhorn. “It was hot, it was humid and we would have to cover ourselves with mosquito repellent several times a day."

And it was within these hot, muggy, and snake-infested environs, shooting for 35-days between July and August, 1975, that a dozen or so ghastly creatures garbed in Wehrmacht uniforms and black goggles slowly rose from the bottom of the sea, surfaced, and headed inland in one truly spectacular sequence.

One by one they pop-up from the water, and as these undead automata begin trudging toward land, en masse, deadly silent, methodical and ruthless, they honestly bring to mind the ghostly Templars from Armando de Ossorio’s Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972) -- and we’ll be referring to them from here on out as the Aqua-Nazis.

Unaware of this development, as the sun rises, and apparently stuck indefinitely, Keith sends Dobbs on a mission back to the Bonaventure for some needed supplies. But as he makes his way back to the beach through the chest-deep lagoon, the cook soon realizes he is no longer alone as the Aqua-Nazis have him surrounded and quickly move in for the kill, inadvertently herding their victim into a cache of deadly sea urchins, robbing them of their prey.

Meantime, back at the hotel, Keith spots the old German, manages to corner him, and finally gets some answers. Told they must all leave immediately, Keith is more than happy to oblige if he’ll only explain how -- which he does, saying there is a small boat hidden in a nearby cove that should get them to safety. But they must hurry, for there is danger here. Danger in the water.

Alas, this warning comes too late for Rose, as she goes for another swim and bumps right into Dobb’s corpse. And after Chuck and Keith drag the body ashore, they find a torn SS insignia clutched in the dead man’s hand. And while Chuck contends that means the old German must be responsible, Keith isn’t so sure and says to maybe ask them, pointing out two Aqua-Nazis observing them from a distance before they slowly disappear beneath the water. With that, the men of the party confront the old German, who can’t believe they’ve wasted all this time and still aren’t off the island yet; and now he fears it may be too late -- for everybody.

Admitting that he did kill Dobbs, albeit indirectly, the German explains how he was in charge of that top-secret operation to create those Nazi super-soldiers, where they experimented on hoodlums, thugs, and murderers, turning them into monsters. Not dead -- but not alive either, he explains. And eventually, they engineered a perfect batch of specimens that were impervious to heat or cold. Calling them the Toten Korps (-- translated as the Death Corps, ‘natch), the SS tried to use them in battle but soon found out they couldn’t be controlled when these monsters turned on their masters, eventually killing everybody.

By the time this disaster was corralled and cleaned up, the war wasn't going well for Germany; and so, our mad scientist took the last batch of deviants, engineered to breathe underwater to be the ultimate U-boat sailors, and escaped capture on The Praetorious. But when word came that Germany had surrendered, fearing his creations would go haywire again, the order was given to scuttle the ship, sending his damnable creations to the bottom of the ocean.

As the architect of this madness, he then took up exile on this deserted island to keep watch, just in case, but he honestly thought he’d destroyed them for good. He was wrong. And when these interlopers don’t believe a word he’s said, the old man pulls a pistol and gives them two choices: get off the island, or he will shoot them all himself.

Taking this threat seriously, as the castaways go to search for that promised boat, the German seeks out and finds his old squad of Aqua-Nazis, who ignore his calls and disappear into the surf. Undaunted, his search continues until he stops to rest, bending over to take a drink out of a fresh-water stream, but then spots, too late, one of his creations just below the water’s surface. (Nice knowing you, Scary German Guy.)

Once the old boat is secured, our group has to navigate it out of a swampy tide-pool to get to the open ocean and make their escape. Breaking out of the trees, since they appear to be home free, Keith sets the small sail but the water is still too shallow. And as the boat keeps getting hung up on sandbars, they all must bail out and push the vessel toward deeper water.

Beverly is the first to notice the Aqua-Nazis are right behind them, so it’s only fitting that she’s the one who stumbles and falls behind. As Norman and Chuck abandon the boat to rush back to her aid, since the water’s finally deep enough, Keith tosses Rose into the boat to man the rudder while he heads back to help out, too.

But as the men manage to gather up Beverly, luck is against them again as the wind whips the sail around, knocking Rose out of the boat. And as the unmanned craft heads swiftly out to sea, Keith frantically swims after it but quickly realizes this is a lost cause and swims back toward shore.

Well ahead of him, the others make it back to dry land but apparently got separated. And as Rose tries to calm a frantic Norman down, who desperately wants to know if his wife is safe, they decide to head back to the hotel. (Okay, so maybe old Norman isn't such an asshole after all. And I'm truly amazed he's lasted this long.) But in his panicked state, Norman leaves a floundering Rose well and far behind in his wake. Soon out of sight, she calls for him to wait up, but he can’t hear her anymore.

Then, the Aqua-Nazis turn their goggled-sights on Rose, giving us an extended stalk-n-chase scene that leads us all the way back to the hotel, where she tries to hide by the swimming pool but the damned things are in there, too!

But as one of them grabs her, our heroine manages to rip off it's goggles, which proves most productive -- for its eyes are now exposed to the sunlight, causing the creature to scream in pain as it collapses and “dies,” which also causes the other Aqua-Nazis to retreat.

When the others reach the hotel -- and for the record, Chuck and Beverly found Norman’s body, and gather up Rose, who, alas, doesn't put together the lethality of removing those goggles from these predators, they decide to hole-up in the kitchen's huge walk-in freezer, rigged to lock from the inside, just as those water-logged bad guys start sloshing around the hotel, hunting for them.

But their refuge is not quite big enough as Chuck’s acute claustrophobia soon gets the better of him. And as he begs to be let out, Keith won’t comply until Chuck threatens to shoot him with a flare gun.

Once they let him out, the manic man also demands their only flashlight. But Keith refuses, and then slams the door shut, catching Chuck’s arm in the jam -- the same arm that was holding that flare gun, which pops off into this enclosed space. And when the flare’s fire and smoke drives everyone out, the weasley Chuck steals the coveted flashlight and flees.

Meantime, blinded by the flare-gun’s flash, Beverly stumbles off into the darkness alone -- though not as alone as she thinks, while Keith and Rose head deeper into the hotel's basement. Chuck, meanwhile, manages to make it outside only to fall into the swimming pool -- where several Aqua-Nazis are waiting. And while he puts up a good fight, and almost manages to climb out, he is ultimately dragged back under the fetid water and drowned.

Come the dawn, in an ironic twist (-- that all of the filmmakers failed to realize), Rose and Keith manage to survive this Night of the Soggy Dead and evade their Aqua-Nazi tormentors by hiding inside the hotel's massive coal furnace. Wow. And wow again.

All seems quiet as they find poor Beverly, drowned in that aquarium, and then Chuck’s body floating in the pool. After that, the Aqua-Nazis are soon swarming and attack, chasing the surviving couple as they abandon the hotel and run for the beach, where they jump in the glass-bottom dinghy and try to row out to sea.

But the going is too slow, and though Keith manages to fight off the first two Aqua-Nazis, the third pulls him over the side and under the water. In the boat, Rose waits a few silent beats, scanning the water, but then sees Keith’s body floating underneath her.

This proves too much for the girl, who screams and then passes out as the boat drifts out to sea.

And as our flashback ends, we catch up with Rose at the hospital, where she appears to be jotting down these memories in a journal; until we realize that she keeps repeating the same thing over and over again. And then we pan around to see that all she’s been writing down is a bunch of gibberish. Turns out Rose is no longer with us.

When a small Want Ad ran in The Miami Herald in the early summer of 1975, looking for extras for an independent horror movie destined to be shot in their fair city, which needed mean looking men with strong Germanic features, Jay Maeder, a reporter and columnist for the newspaper, was tagged by his editor to go out and cover these auditions, thinking it would make a swell human interest feature.

Now, Maeder was a bit of a throwback when it came to journalism and a bit of an odd duck when it came to his People Column, which was described in his 2014 obituary as a blend of irreverence, gossip and frippery. “Everyone lives life in 3-D, [Maeder] kind of wrote about life in 4-D,” said his former editor, John Brecher. “Whatever the story was that you asked Jay to do, you could count on the fact no one in the world would write the story the way Jay Maeder would write it."

But it wasn’t just features, as news photographer Battle Vaughan pointed out in the same obit. “He was a reporter unlike any I’d ever worked with. He could get into anywhere, fit in, and report back with both laser precision and a mastery of language.” As an example, Maeder once went undercover and joined a group of homeless people who were being recruited by a cult, exposing a conspiracy to use them to swell the voting rolls in a rural county. Thus, Maeder would not go to the audition just to cover it but instead neglected to announce he was a reporter at all and just auditioned for a part himself.

About 25 men showed up, and Maeder, along with about eight others, were pulled from the line and told to leave a name and telephone number. Not much to write about, so the story was shelved until about a month later when Maeder got a follow-up call and reported to the office of Reuben Trane, who explained what the role would entail: being not only a zombie, but an underwater Nazi zombie; and then revealed a photo of the prototype make-up that would be involved.

Wiederhorn was also there, and made it clear it was going to be long hours, dirty work, with a lot of time in and under the water -- most of it in stagnant bogs or tepid lagoons filled with who knows what, and all kinds of things crawling and creeping within them -- and every one of them would bite.

Maeder agreed to all of the above and a few days later he was issued a Nazi uniform and sent to a Cuban beauty school and salon to get his hair shorn off and bleached white; a chemical process that was really quite painful. And as the shoot dragged on, Maeder would often slosh into the office, not-so-fresh from the set, and prowl around the newsroom in “fetid, swamp-rot Nazi regalia."

About halfway through the shoot, Maeder finally came clean and revealed who he was and why he was there. Both Wiederhorn and Trane had no objections, of course, figuring any publicity was good publicity at this point. And so, Maeder’s column, I Am a Zombie: Confessions of an Extra in Low Budget Death Corps, was published in the August 10, 1975 edition of the Miami Herald, one week after shooting wrapped.

In the article on the front page of the Lively Arts section, Maeder goes into much detail about the production, interviewing Wiederhorn and Trane -- crediting Wiederhorn with an extraordinary talent for finding unimaginably stagnant ponds, sewer canals, and other revolting bodies of water to shoot his movie in. He also talks about the two famous stars destined to headline the film and its ever-revolving title -- Death Corps, The Dead Don't Die, Sea of Fear, Black Sand, Nightmare Island, Island of Doom, Monsters of the Third Reich, Almost Human, and finally, Shock Waves (1977).

But the majority of the writing concerns himself and the trials and tribulations he and his fellow Death Corpsmen faced while filming, including his big scene, where he kills Jack Davidson, who played Norman.

“We Death Corpsmen seem to spend a lot of our time crouching underwater,” said Maeder in his after action report, “biding our time until one hapless victim or another stumbles past. Busy busy busy. If it’s one thing we’ve got here, it’s hapless victims … Up from the murky depths I come, crashing through waste deep water … Fingers like steel bands around his hapless throat. The mighty strength of a Death Corpsman. The bulging eyes of the victim. Death in the bright afternoon.” Well, at least until the director called for a cut because he’d botched something. Again.

Yeah, it took four takes to get that scene right. On the first, Maeder blew his cue on when to surface. The second, it took too long for him to catch up to Davidson and they were hopelessly out of frame. And the third was Davidson’s fault, anticipating his fatal submersion too much. The fourth take, was good enough. For his efforts, Maeder and the other Aqua-Nazis were paid $25 a day. And while he seemed genuinely proud of his efforts, the reporter made it clear the majority of the credit should go to Alan Ormsby, the make-up man behind the Death Corps signature look.

Ormsby was a drama student at the University of Florida when he first met Bob Clark. And these two would go on to collaborate on the low-budget zombie movie, Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972), which he co-wrote, starred in, and did the zombie make-up for. Shot in Miami, the film is both cheap and obnoxious and yet startlingly effective with its chills. Clark and Ormsby would follow that up with Deathdream (1974), a twisted tale based on W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw, which Ormsby had adapted into a screenplay and supervised the special make-up effects, breaking in some novice named Tom Savini.

He had just finished shooting Deranged (1974) up in Canada, a creepy take on the notorious necrophiliac and body snatcher, Ed Gein, which Ormsby wrote, co-directed, and once again supervised the make-ups for; but he had a falling out with Clark, who was the film’s uncredited producer, who shut his old friend out of the post-production phase of the film. And so, he was available. And more importantly, he was back home in Miami.

Of course, being unfamiliar with horror films, Wiederhorn wasn’t really aware of what Ormsby had done. But they screened Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and he immediately took a liking to Ormsby, finding they were very like-minded when it came to injecting humor into these horrific proceedings. And aside from the requirement that they had to wear those goggles to provide some form of vulnerability, Ormsby pretty much had a free hand in the designs of the Aqua-Nazis. There were plenty of concerns at first due to the requirements of the make-up holding up underwater, but with several tweaks and a few additives the make-up held together splendidly, resulting in something relatively simple, unique, and extremely effective.

Maeder described the make-up call as “devoting an hour every morning at the table of the Winnebago,” where Ormsby would apply “warts and festering sores and harelips and thick layers of latex and greasepaint.” Playing these zombies were Maeder, Bob Miller, Talmadge Scott, Gary Levinson, Sammy Graham, Preston White, Reid Finger, Donahue Guillory, Mike Kennedy, Robert Miller and Tony Moskal.

Moskal, according to both Maeder’s article and Wiederhorn’s director’s commentary on the Blue Underground DVD of Shock Waves, was very much at home in the water and quickly established himself as the prime Aqua-Nazi, winning “the boundless respect of Wiederhorn and Trane” for his intensity and devotion to every scene he was in. “The rest of us were clods,” said Maeder, “who couldn’t do anything right.”

One of his co-stars couldn’t help wiping his nose whenever he surfaced; another couldn’t stop giggling when he was supposed to attack someone; and apparently it was very difficult to see through those darkened goggles, so these deadly Death Corpsmen tended to bump into each other. A lot. And Maeder claimed that he, himself, at some point or other, tripped over every mangrove root in Matheson Hammock.

And while I do feel Wiederhorn goes back to the well a few times too many with all the cutaways to the Aqua-Nazis lurking under the water, or slowly rising out of the surf only to slowly return under the surf. But I’ll be damned if each one isn’t effective or lacks impact as they stealthily pop out of nowhere and attack. And a lot of credit needs to go to this pack of “screw-ups” for these marvelously eerie set-pieces -- and I never saw a single air bubble escape from the whole lot of them.

When filming wrapped, Wiederhorn took all of the footage back to New York, where it was edited together by Norman Gay, who had worked with William Friedkin as an associate editor on The French Connection (1971) and was nominated for an Oscar for his work on The Exorcist (1973). Wiederhorn was also responsible for bringing in fellow Columbia grad, Richard Einhorn, to do the soundtrack for the film, whose minimalist electronic score really gets under your skin and helps glue the film together into a bizarre trance-like state, which is only enhanced by the grain of the film being blown up to 35mm, giving things a strange, waking dream vibe.

When it was finally finished, there was a long delay before Shock Waves was finally released. Of course, there had been a lot of interest from distributors -- most prominently, Crown International, but Trane was smart enough to have the family lawyers go over the contracts first for any irregularities or “black holes” that would eat into their share of the profits.

They finally settled on Joseph Brenner, whose company handled the likes of Cheri Cafaro’s Ginger McAllister trilogy -- Ginger (1971), The Abductors (1972), Girls Are For Loving (1973), and foreign imports, ranging from Umberto Lenzi’s Sacrifice (1972) and Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) to the Shaw Brother’s totally mental Infra-Man (1975). And so, nearly two years after it wrapped, Shock Waves finally made its theatrical debut in July, 1977, where it ran into a little competition from Peter Cushing’s other film that came out that year. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?

Still, as Maeder put it in his article, “[Shock Waves] does not promise to be an especially bad film or, the implausibilities notwithstanding, even a merely silly one: Even in rough footage it emerges as a genuinely gripping little flick graced by the atmospherics of the Wiederhorn-chosen locations -- including the ravaged Biltmores in Coral Gables and Palm Beach as well as the mucklands of Matheson Hammock and Key Biscayne.” He wasn’t quite as kind in his follow up review of the film in 1977, though; but Maeder still called the film a good time to be had by all since “the killing and related unpleasantry are relatively bloodless since Zopix was going for a PG-rating."

“We’re ready for TV without any major changes,” said Trane. Yeah, unlike Florida’s earlier exploitation scene, where the likes of Hershell Gordon Lewis or Richard Flink shoveled all kinds of gore and bodily dismemberment onto movie screens, Shock Waves isn’t very gross or bloody. There were a few attempts to add some punch, including some failed squibs, but with no money to try again these notions were soon abandoned. Said Wiederhorn, “We knew going in that we did not want to get into a lot of bloody special-effects because we were making a low-budget movie, and it seemed to me that the way to succeed was not to become overly ambitious. To really make sure that what we were doing was something that we could in fact do."

As for Trane and Wiederhorn post-Shock Waves, well, the former got out of the business altogether and took up a highly successful career as a boat-builder after their next feature, King Frat (1979) -- an obnoxious Animal House (1978) knock-off that, despite a few moments of genuine hilarity, really didn’t go anywhere. Wiederhorn, meanwhile, stayed in the game, turning out the effective thriller, Eyes of a Stranger (1981), even though his producers insisted against his wishes that his strangler be turned into a knife-wielding psycho and to bloody things up to cash-in on the current Slasher craze, before flaming out with a couple of sequels, Meatballs II (1984) and Return of the Living Dead II (1988).

But, these two still gave us Shock Waves. And while they never did get around to invading Miami Beach, what Wiederhorn, Trane, and Ormsby, and all the others managed to pull off on their limited budget was a strange little bugaboo of a film; a fever dream, really, where things don’t quite add up logically, which only adds to the dread and a strange sense of unease and unreality.

Thus, this film tends to stand out because it looks and behaves so differently, bringing to mind Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962) on one hand, and on the other, when you combine the tropical setting, the zombified antagonists, and the pulsing electronic score, there is a definite prescient Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (1979) vibe coming off this thing, too -- just not quite as gory and without all the eyeball trauma.

Thus, despite a few minor quibbles and a few glitches in continuity, and the fact that I honestly believe a youthful first impression of catching this feature on The Late Late Show might be shadowing my favorable opinion on this flick just a bit, I still deem Shock Waves an offbeat gem and a creepy afternooner that is just begging to be wasted on your TV screens.

Well, if you don't know what Hubrisween is by now, Boils and Ghouls, I don't think I can help you. Anyhoo, that's 19 films down with seven yet to go. Up next, this time Venus invades Earth, and they brought a few adorable robots with them.

Shock Waves (1977) Zopix Company :: Joseph Brenner Associates / P: Reuben Trane / D: Ken Wiederhorn / W: John Kent Harrison, Ken Pare, Ken Wiederhorn / C: Irving Pare / E: Norman Gay / M: Richard Einhorn / S: Brooke Adams, Luke Halpin, Fred Buch, D.J. Sidney, Jack Davidson, John Carradine, Peter Cushing

Hubrisween 2020 :: R is for Robot Monster (1953)

2020-10-23T02:19:00.001-05:00

We begin in True Stereo Three-Dimensions as the opening credits roll. And while the menacing score bombasts over some forgotten sci-fi pulp of yore, our film proper begins with young Johnny, decked out in his best Tom Corbett space gear, scouring the countryside for any alien invaders to disintegrate with his trusty atomic bubble-gun. Now, the only target Johnny (Moffet) can find is his little sister, Carla (Paulson), but he tries to disintegrate her anyway -- and with extreme prejudice.

After this skirmish ceases, these siblings continue to play and squabble until they come upon a cave, where two archeologists are trying to excavate a prehistoric painting off the wall near the entrance.

Threatened with being atomized unless they identify themselves, the younger man, Roy (Nader), quickly surrenders, but the Professor (Mylong) stands his ground. And as he lectures the boy on the wonders of peaceful coexistence, unable to decipher the old man's ever-changing accent, Johnny quickly agrees to end all hostilities and holsters his atomic bubble-gun.

Then, after a quick history lesson on the primitive beings who used to inhabit these caves, Johnny is so impressed he no longer wants to be a Space Ranger when he grows up but a fuddy old scientist with a dubious European accent. Johnny then relates this career decision to his mother and older sister, Alice (Barret), who were out looking for them and finally caught up. And once the introductions are out of the way, Johnny quickly tries to ingratiate Roy with Alice, but she’s not having it. Meantime, when mother Martha (Royale) invites the two men to come have lunch with them, they beg off and get back to work.

Moving on, this family of four chooses what appears to be the middle of Hell's Half Acre for their picnic spot. And as they dig in, when Martha reminds the younger kids they promised to take a nap right after lunch, Johnny grumps over this notion; and then, rather bluntly, asks if he's ever gonna get another dad -- quickly narrowing mom's playing field down to anyone who's a scientist, preferably one with a phony European accent. With that, the rest of the meal is eaten in very uncomfortable silence. Once finished, each family member pulls up a rock and drifts off to sleep.

Time passes, and Johnny is the first to wake up. Armed with his trusty side-arm, the boy returns to the cave but finds it deserted. Suddenly, a massive discharge of energy causes Johnny to fall. And as the kid gets a nasty face-burger while planting his noggin into the dirt, our film quickly dissolves into sheer insanity as more lights pop and flash, and a series of earthquakes rock the world, reducing massive cities into piles of rubble. A cataclysm so sudden and powerful, it also seems to have punched a hole in the space-time continuum!

And springing out of this temporal chaos, two triceratops try to dry-hump one another and a familiar looking “Dimetradon” battles a “Tyrannosaurus Rex” once more to the death, leaving a stunned audience to boggle and ask -- WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!? Well, all I can say in answer to that is, Wait for it … As Johnny wakes up, unaccountably decked-out in a new pair of futuristic duds, and armed with a slightly more lethal looking atomic-disintegrator pistol, which he once more holsters so he can take up a can of paint and makes an attempt to expand upon that mural on the cave wall.

Now. At this point, you’ve probably also noticed how the entrance to the cave is now filled to the brim with all kinds of, uhm, … “hi-tech” equipment, including a communication device, deviously camouflaged as a cardboard box, and on the other side, mounted on a table, a surplus World War II radio that's belching out a ton of bubbles. Quite the surreal scene.

Meanwhile, brush in hand, Johnny keeps painting until there's another massive energy discharge, much closer this time, forcing him to head for cover. And once he's clear, from out of the depths of the cave stalks one of the greatest screen menaces of all time: Ro-Man Agent XJ-2 -- the ultimate instrument of destruction from the Planet Ro-Man!

Okay. Calm down. Look, I know our “Robot Monster” looks suspiciously like a gorilla with a TV-antennae adorned deep-sea diver's helmet for a head, but think about it for a second. Maybe it's camouflage? Did you ever think of that? Didn't think so. Either way, as our internal Goof-o-Meter redlines, careens out of control, and augurs itself very deep into the earth, lets just roll with this as Ro-Man (Barrows, and voiced by Brown) waddles over to the communicator and puts in a call to his Supreme Leader, The Great Guidance (also Barrows and Brown).

Talking in a bizarre, minimalist techno-babble, Guidance scolds his agent on the ground for reporting in late. Blaming Earth's gravity for this error, as their conversation continues, Ro-Man is told no other forms of life in the universe have been found, meaning the Earth was their only rival for galactic supremacy -- stress on the “was."

Seems at first, through subterfuge shown in a series of nonsensical flashbacks, Ro-Man managed to get the world-powers to basically nuke themselves to death. And once the atomic fallout had settled, he then finally revealed himself to mop-up what little was left in terms of resistance. His mission apparently a complete success, Ro-Man triumphantly reports the Earth has now been completely scoured free of the hu-man plague, thanks to his trusty Calcinator Death-Ray.

Not so fast, says Guidance, who then grumpily points out the multiple errors in his minion’s correlating-vector calculations because, according to his data, there are still eight hu-mans on the loose. And since his boss is not amused with these egregious miscalculations, to save face, Ro-Man vows he will complete his mission post-haste, obliterate the rest of humanity, so the Ro-Men of the Planet Ro-Man can rule the Galaxy unimpeded at long last...

A legend amongst the B-Movie Brethren already, I think Phil Tucker’s Robot Monster (1953) definitely needs to dethrone Edward D. Wood Jr.’s Plan Nine from Outer Space (1959) as thee quintessential, so bad it's good, B-movie watching experience. For! Whereas Plan Nine tends to grind to a halt in spots with lengthy plot dumps, there are no dull moments in Robot Monster, which brings the schlock and the bedlam, non-stop, from start to finish. And of producer/director Phil Tucker, I can only paraphrase Dan Aykroyd’s character, Dr. Raymond Stantz, from Ghostbusters (1984): Either Tucker was a genius, or a certified whacko. As for which? Well, it might’ve been both.

As I scoured the web and dusted-off and searched through my old monster movie compendiums and Horror and Sci-Fi history books, trying to dig up any info on Tucker’s bio or background before his film career proved maddeningly elusive. What little we do know is he was born in 1927, a native of Kansas; he was a Marine Corps veteran, time of service unknown; and had written several short stories for certain Sci-Fi pulps and magazines -- of which I could find none. And that’s about it until Tucker, through a series of friends, came under the wing of producer George Weiss around the age of 25.

A student of the Kroger Babb school of road-showing, four walling, and square-up reels, where you could get away with just about anything considered obscene or forbidden by the Hays Code as long as you presented your film as being educational like with Babb's Mom and Dad (1945), Weiss and his Screen Classic Productions had already delivered a tell-all look at artificial insemination in Test Tube Babies (1948), the horrors of narcotics with The Devil's Sleep (1949), and a harsh lesson of female wrestlers duped into a money-laundering scheme in Racket Girls (1951).

Thus, I have no idea what kind of background Tucker had in film or filmmaking when he wound up working behind the scenes on Weiss’ burlesque film, Paris After Midnight (1951), which was raided by the police during production due its obscene content of strippers doing their thing. And when he had gathered enough experience, Weiss then pegged Tucker to direct the feature, Dance Hall Racket (1953), written by and starring legendary stand-up comedian, Lenny Bruce, his wife, stripper Honey Harlow, and mother, Sally Marr, which concerned dirty flesh-peddlers doing dirty things.

Now, there has been some dispute as to whether Dance Hall Racket or Robot Monster was young Tucker’s directorial debut as both were released the same year. Either way, while the former was for Weiss the second was for another notoriously cheap schlockmeister, Al Zimbalist -- of King Dinosaur (1955) and Monster from Green Hell (1957) infamy. Zimbalist had worked in the publicity departments for Warner Bros. and RKO in the 1930s and ‘40s before signing on as an assistant for Edward J. Alperson in a series of gender-swapped tales of adventure -- The Sword of Monte Cristo (1951), Rose of Cimarron (1952), and then Walter Wanger for another female revisionist take with The Lady in the Iron Mask (1952).

Then, Zimbalist decided to strike out on his own around 1952, announcing the formation of his own production company, Motion Picture Artists Corporation, and, sticking with the theme, the fledgling producer’s first proposed feature was originally supposed to be Miss Robin Crusoe. But this was put on hold to focus on a couple of Sci-Fi creature features instead that would hopefully prove more alluring to any potential distributors. One of which was Cat Women on the Moon (1953), and the other, Robot Monster -- both of them slated to be shot in 3D, which was just starting to blow-up after the release of Arch Oboler’s Bwana Devil (1952).

For if it wasn’t obvious already, money was extremely tight on both of these inaugural features -- and this definitely shows on screen. With $5000 of the film’s already meager $16,000 budget solely going toward renting the needed 3D camera equipment, this, of course, did not leave much money for everything else as Tucker and his cinematographer, Jack Greenhalgh, eschewed any sets and shot out in the open around the familiar environs of Bronson Canyon, along with a few pick-ups around an unfinished housing project near Chavez-Ravine and Dodger Stadium, trying to get Wyatt Ordung’s fairly (and perhaps too) ambitious post-apocalyptic script down on film.

Born in Shanghai, China, of mixed parentage, Ordung had served in the U.S. Army during World War II. After, he migrated to Hollywood around 1951, looking to break into showbiz as an actor, landing a few bit-parts -- most notably on TV as the Dick Tracy villain, BB-Eyes, and as an uncredited G.I. in Samuel Fuller’s Korean War thriller, Fixed Bayonets (1951). Around this time Ordung also tried his hand at screenwriting, which eventually landed him the Robot Monster gig; and later, he wrote the scripts for things ranging from another alien invasion / disaster movie, Target Earth (1954), to the hard-boiled tale of revenge, Walk the Dark Street (1956), which he also produced and directed. He would also direct one of Roger Corman’s first productions, Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954).

As mentioned earlier, the eyes of Ordung’s script were “slightly” bigger than the budget’s stomach, leading to a lot of stock-footage abuse and the old low-budget standby of telling a lot and showing very little. Among the pilfered FX were several matte paintings by Irving Block, including scenes of mass destruction and devastation lifted from Stuart Gilmore’s Captive Women (1952) and a rocket and gantry that can be traced back to Kurt Neumann’s Rocketship X-M (1950), while yet another rocket can be traced to Lesley Selander’s Flight to Mars (1951).

The earthquake and live lizard combatants with the glued-on features belong to Hal Roach’s One Million B.C. (1940) -- and that poor camain and monitor lizard, locked forever in eternal combat, savaged and ravaged, would haunt many a film yet to come. So spare a thought for them, will ya, and then pretend to kick both Roach and animal supervisor Roy Seawright right in the nuts.

Meantime, those randy stop-motion triceratops escaped from Edward Nassour and Sam Newfield’s version of Lost Continent (1951). But you have to understand, when Tucker and company tried to overachieve on any component or element for Robot Monster that they didn’t borrow or steal from somewhere else, the results were both, well, impressive and downright hilarious, beginning with their leading menace.

Since its debut, Tucker and his most infamous cinematic creation has been lampooned over the years for both its sheer absurdity and complete incongruity when trying to match up his antagonist with the title of his movie. One long held rumor was that Tucker actually had a robot suit built -- more likely stolen, sorry, “borrowed” from another production, but it couldn’t handle the rigors of outdoor filming, fell apart, and all he could salvage was the headpiece and improvised from there. However, in a rare interview with Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss for the book, The Fifty Worst Films of All Time and How They Got That Way (1978), Tucker sort of set the record straight on how they wound up with a gorilla-shaped hunk of Sci-Fi infamy:

“Well, I originally envisioned the monster as a kind of robot,” said Tucker. “I talked to several people that I knew who had robot suits, but it was just out-of-the way, money wise.” But Tucker’s salvation came in the form of George Barrows. “George’s occupation was a gorilla suit man. When they needed a gorilla in a picture, they called George, because he owned his own suit and got like forty-bucks a day."

Barrows was a bit player and a stuntman with a career that spanned over 50 years, who played his first gorilla in Tarzan and His Mate (1934). When the 1950s rolled around, Barrows had built himself his first gorilla suit and landed a couple spots on the Abbott and Costello TV show, which was around the time Tucker gave him a call. And to help give the illusion that this gorilla was of extraterrestrial origin, it looks like they liberated a Moon Man helmet from Republic Pictures’ prop department after it appeared a year earlier in the Commando Cody vehicle, Radar Men from the Moon (1952), welded a TV antennae to it, stuck a nylon stocking over Barrows exposed head, sealed him up, and the rest, as they say, is cinematic history.

Thus, with everything slapped and dashed together with spit, sparklers, and bailing wire, principal photography on Robot Monster began on March 20, 1953, and then wrapped three whole days later on March 23. From there, Tucker turned over the footage to his editor, Merrill White, who was tasked to make some semblance of a narrative out of Ordung’s fever dream of a script and Tucker’s exposed nitrate nonsense as Ro-Man the Robot Monster confirms his task to kill all the hu-mans, signs off the communicator, and waddles back into the cave. Once he’s gone, an eavesdropping Johnny hightails it home; home being the basement of a bombed-out house encircled by a series of live electrical wires.

Now remember, our reality has shifted a bit. Family wise, things are relatively the same except now the Professor really is Johnny's dad, and both he and Martha verbally tan the boy’s hide for wandering outside the electronic jamming barrier of the house (-- seems that's what all those wires are for), exposing them to Ro-Man’s censors. (Damn. That's some bubble machine.) Here, Johnny tries to warn them that Ro-Man is just over the hill in a nearby cave but the Professor can hardly believe such a terrible coincidence. (Neither can I, really.)

Here, we also find out Herr Professor was one of the world's greatest scientists before these end times, who created a super immunity serum, which he then field-tested on his entire family, which kept them relatively safe from Ro-Man’s genocidal machinations thus far. Turns out dad wasn't the only genius in the family, either, because that electronic screen was eldest daughter Alice’s creation. (Here I'll will also pause to point out this genius gene pool seems to have dried up a bit on Johnny and Carla. Not exactly the brightest bulbs in the world.)

Pondering their options, all the last family on Earth can come up with is they must find Ro-Man's weakness or they're doomed to extinction. Still, the Professor clings to a hope that some others also must've managed to escape Ro-Man's detection, who can help with Earth's resistance. One head slap later, Alice reminds everyone there's still an entire garrison of troops aboard an orbiting Space Platform. The only problem is, they can't communicate with them for fear of detection and discovery. Almost on cue, their own communicator kicks on. Hoping it's the Space Platform, to their horror, Ro-Man materializes on the vid-screen!

Computing only five hu-mans are present, and not the expected eight, Ro-Man assumes the Guidance made an error, adjusts accordingly, and then informs these last survivors if they will surrender now, he promises a quick and painless death. To help them decide, our villain cues up some footage of those who chose not to go quietly. As the others watch in horror, Alice doesn't take this latest population census very well because it means a man named Roy is most likely dead. Seeing enough, when the Professor tells the tin-pot invader to go and suck on his transistors because they will never, ever, capitulate, an enraged Ro-Man now promises them all a horribly painful death before signing off.

Now, despite her husband's flash of bravado, Martha is starting to crack a little, thinking perhaps they should reconsider Ro-Man’s offer and just get it over with; but the Professor remains firm, defiantly stating if Ro-Man wants them, he can calculate them.

Meanwhile, over at the cave, we discover the reports of Roy's demise have been greatly exaggerated as he's currently spying on Ro-Man, who's making another call to his boss to report his error on how many hu-mans were left.

Growing more annoyed by the second, Guidance quickly gives his field agent a remedial course on "reduction, correlation, and elimination of errors." There are EIGHT hu-mans left, not five, and before hanging up, he gives Ro-Man only one more Earth day to complete the mission or he will be sentenced for failure!

Back in the basement, when Roy (Nader) returns, Alice is so overjoyed he's still alive that she spends the next five minutes bitterly sniping at him. Happy to see her, too, Roy also brings more good news: Jason and McCloud are also still alive. (Who are they? Sorry. Not in the budget. And believe me, it won't matter in about five minutes.) Seems these men managed to scrounge up enough fuel to launch a rocket to the Space Platform, loaded with enough of the Professor’s serum to immunize the entire garrison; and once that’s done, they’ll all kick a little Ro-man ass.

Unable to contact the Platform to let them know they’re coming without being detected, fearing they might think the salvation rocket was sent by Ro-Man and destroy it by mistake, Alice insists they must try and is certain she can rewire the communicator so the alien can’t detect their signals -- if Roy will take orders for a change and help, that is.

What follows is a long -- albeit hilarious -- scene of two pairs of hands working in tandem on some machinery as Alice and Roy continue to bicker, wasting two whole days by their account. And, wow, are these tinkering scenes chock full of inappropriate innuendo and double-entendres. Freud would have a field day -- I think my favorite loaded snipe is when Roy claims Alice is so bossy, she has to be milked when she comes home. When is a soldering tool not a soldering tool? Well, I'll leave that up to you, Boils and Ghouls. And what does all this accomplish? Absolutely nothing. Well, at least they tried.

To make matters even more dire, Ro-Man calls again, who is now even more confused because there are six hu-mans instead of five hu-mans when there should be eight hu-mans (-- and to think: this guy conquered the world. Depressing, isn't it?) Talking instead of thinking, Alice blurts out this must mean he still doesn’t know about Jason and McCloud -- but I think he does now, genius.

However, Ro-Man reveals he had already detected their rocket launching and gleefully shows them the play by play as Guidance first blows the rocket -- played deftly by stock footage of a V2 missile, out of the sky, and then shows them the Space Platform -- played not so deftly by a plastic model with a sparkler shoved up it's butt, swinging in an erratic circle.

This gets blown up, too, but luckily, the very visible hand holding it up is left unharmed. With that, declaring they have no hope and surrender is the only solution, Ro-Man gives the hu-mans one hour to decide before signing off.

Okay, by now, you’re probably shouting at the screen, saying, Now wait a second, Ro-Man had only ONE Earth day to complete the mission. Then the hu-mans spent TWO whole Earth days working on the communicator. The hell? Well, I guess if the Ro-Men can’t count, can we really expect them to be able tell time? Anyhoo, devastated by this dire turn of events, after the family weighs their ever dwindling options, Martha thinks they should try and appeal to Ro-Man for mercy. The Professor agrees, thinking they can reason with him. But to do this, Alice and Roy will need to rewire the communicator to his frequency. Oh god, not again!

I assume another two Earth days later, when the communicator at the cave activates, Ro-Man quickly waddles out of the darkness to take the call. Now, you, like me, have probably noticed that Ro-Man spends quite a lot of time at the back of his cave. And it was at this point I finally deduced what was really going on back there. I can’t prove this scientifically, but I think the back of the cave is the *ahem* "little Ro-man’s room." Seems our hero came to Earth, drank the water, and the rest is history. Think of it as Montezuma’s Revenge on a galactic scale, and keep your eye out for any toilet paper stuck to his foot as he turns on the vid-screen and is surprised to see who it is on the other end of the transmission.

Ordered to state their business, the Professor once again announces they will never give up and humanity will survive, making us the cockroaches of the galactic frontier. He then asks what exactly do the Ro-Men have to fear from hu-mans? To this, we get the standard reply that we're too self-destructive and can’t handle tampering in god’s domain etc. etc. Stymied on this front, the Professor then appeals to Ro-Man's hu-manity by introducing his family, but the Ro-Man isn't all that interested until the defiant Alice takes her turn in front of the vid-screen, demanding peace with honor. And when they try to move on to Roy, Ro-Man demands to see Alice again. And those of you who can see where this is obviously going, please raise your hands. Everybody? Everybody. Good.

Yeah, I believe the hu-man resistance has finally found Ro-Man’s only weakness as it appears our alien invader is getting some biological urges that he can’t quite compute -- and these urges are starting to cloud his Ro-Man logic. [This program has performed an illegal action and will shut down.] He cannot calculate it, or verify why, but is willing to allow what the hu-mans call "a hope." Thus and so, willing to face the wrath of the Great Guidance, Ro-Man will consider integrating these hu-mans into "The plan" if Alice will have a palaver with him -- alone, he typed ominously. But when Alice agrees to meet him at the fork in the river, Roy and the Professor will have none of that. Even as Alice logically pleads it’s their only hope, they physically restrain her from leaving. And while they tie her up, Johnny manages to sneak away during the struggle to replace Alice at the negotiations.

Wait. What? Really?! This movie is, like, an hour long?!

Next, we get some of the funniest repeating transition scenes as Ro-Man endlessly walks up and down the same hill. (And if you listen real close, you can almost hear Tucker yelling at Barrows to "keep moving" until he shuffles out of frame.)

Meantime, realizing Johnny is missing, Roy volunteers to go and look for him. Alice is allowed to accompany him if she promises to behave, and as those two go and search for the little miscreant, Ro-Man goes up the hill, as Johnny makes his way to the meeting spot; and then Ro-Man goes down the hill, while Roy and Alice continue their search. This sequence of events then repeats itself about, oh, five or six times, with the only variation being, at some point, Roy nonchalantly removes his shirt, until Johnny and Ro-Man finally arrive at the predetermined meeting spot.

Extremely perturbed that Johnny showed up instead of Alice, when the kid mouths off, Ro-Man bluntly states, “Now I will kill you.” (Yay!) But when he tries to fry the little shit with the Calcinator Death Ray, Johnny is unaffected. (Boo.) Alas, civilization is lost once again when Ro-Man tricks Johnny into revealing the source of his immunity, gloating it will be easy enough to adjust the C-Ray and kill them all -- and since I don’t think this involves any counting, I believe the Earth really is doomed this time. Way to go, kid.

Thus, as Ro-Man heads back to his cave to re-calibrate the weapon, he doesn’t detect Roy and Alice hiding in the weeds as he stomps by. Once gone, Alice rises to continue the search for her idiot brother but Roy pulls her back down for the obligatory romantic interlude.

Here, instead of visual metaphors of rockets launching or trains going into tunnels, we get shots of Ro-Man going up and down the same hill. And while the haunting love theme from Robot Monster plays, Roy professes his love to Alice and they go for a *ahem* roll in the thicket (-- and it would be an even more touching scene if Roy wasn't so noticeably bleeding from his ear from some trauma he hasn’t received yet due to a glaring continuity error).

Meantime, Johnny returns to the bunker and fesses up to his colossal blunder. To console him, the Professor offers that it won't be so easy for Ro-Man to counteract the serum. Still, the boy must be punished; and for dooming all of humanity, Johnny is sent to bed without supper. Meanwhile, apparently lost, Ro-Man goes back up and down the same hill until he finally remembers the way back to his cave.

Once there, he cranks up the communicator and reports to his boss why the C-Ray failed to kill the remaining hu-mans. Unimpressed, Guidance warns his minion that the allotted time of one Earth day is half over and to get on with it -- or else! Thus, with time running out, Ro-Man forgoes adjusting the C-Ray and shambles off toward that damnable hill again. Seems sometimes a Ro-Man just has to get his paws dirty. Can you strangle the kid first? Asking for the audience. And waitasecond? Half a day?! It's been, like, five days!

Elsewhere, Roy and Alice return to the bunker. Seems they’ve decided to make it official and ask the Professor to marry them. Feeling this is a swell idea, Johnny stands up as best man and Carla -- oh yeah, Carla -- serves as the maid of honor. In the middle of the service, the Professor pauses to ask the Almighty to intercede on their behalf. (Just say "Man and wife!") And when the ceremony ends, Roy kisses the bride; and after they leave for their honeymoon, Carla realizes that Alice didn’t have any flowers for the wedding and sneaks off to find some.

And so, as Ro-Man goes up the hill, Carla catches up with the newlyweds, presents them with a bouquet, and is sent back home. But on the way, as he comes back down the hill, the girl runs right into Ro-Man, who seizes her, Carla screams, and then we cut back to the cave, where Ro-Man is calling his boss again, reporting there are now only four hu-mans left after he strangled the little girl.

To this, Guidance, who has just about had it with his his mathematically incompetent henchman, once more points out his error. There are five (5) hu-mans left to be expunged. Not four. And it's at this point where Ro-Man admits his error was on purpose and postulates that maybe they can keep one of these hu-mans alive in captivity to study. E’yup. Our little Ro-Man has fallen for the hu-man A-lice. Hard. This hypothesizing, does not go well. At all. Accused of heresy for daring to alter The Plan, Guidance orders Ro-Man to kill all the hu-mans, now, or face the consequences of failure!

Thus and so, with his internal conflict/resolution circuits taxed to the limits, Ro-Man sets out to do his masters bidding and manages to catch Roy and Alice out in the open. After a brief struggle, he easily overpowers and dispatches Roy and seizes the girl. To her credit, Alice pitched in during the fight (-- and sharp ears can hear a verbally unsure and un-scripted "Oh-God!" as Ro-man picks her up and carries her off).

Meanwhile, when they find Carla's discarded body, this proves to be the last straw for poor Martha. And as she breaks down sobbing, the Professor tries to console his wife and encourages her not to give up as he carries their daughter's body back to the bunker for burial.

Not giving up either, while being carried back to the cave, Alice manages to trick Ro-Man into revealing his external power source -- but this vital revelation comes too late and will have absolutely no consequence on the film whatsoever.

Back at the bunker, Carla’s memorial is interrupted when the mortally wounded Roy stumbles in, announces Ro-Man has captured Alice, and then expires. Rallying the troops, Johnny has a plan to rescue his sister: first, they'll call Ro-Man and pretend to surrender, and then, Johnny will use himself as bait to lure Ro-Man out of the cave, allowing the others to rush-in and save Alice.

Meanwhile, Ro-Man has managed to haul Al-ice all the way to his cave without having a stroke, where he professes his love for her rather haphazardly, asking, "Suppose I were a hu-man, would you love me like a man?" That’s a big nope. And as she continues to resist, her captor starts pawing at her, ripping her bodice and exposing her shoulders in true melodramatic fashion.

But as the lecherous Ro-Man tries to take it further his communicator starts pinging. Snatching some rope, he begins to restrain Al-ice but quickly gives up and just knocks her unconscious.

Moving to the communicator, the Professor appears and declares Ro-Man has won, they surrender, and if he wants them, to come and get them. But the libidinous Ro-Man says he’s too busy right now and to call back later. After hanging up, he turns his lustful attention back to Al-ice -- who for some inexplicable reason has gone and tied herself up! Wait. What?! Wow.

Moving toward Al-ice with a lusty, groping paw leading the way, the girl is saved once again by the communicator. Only this time, it’s the Great Guidance and his patience is now at an end as the Ro-Man begins to question the Ro-Men logic: "Why can’t we be like the hu-man ... to laugh and want? Why are these things not in the plan?" But his boss will not hear of this blasphemy and orders Ro-Man to kill the girl. Now! But with his circuits fusing, Ro-Man soon goes into vapor-lock, stuck in an eternal logic-loop, repeating, "I must ... But I cannot" over and over again.

Meanwhile, leaving his mom and dad behind, Johnny marches off to meet his fate. Presenting himself to the malfunctioning Ro-Man, a watching Guidance still insists his agent kill the girl first, and then the boy. Asking Al-ice to forgive him for what he must do, Ro-Man defies his master and shuffles off toward Johnny. Seizing the moment, their parents rush in, and while Martha releases Alice, the Professor smashes the infernal Bubble Machine.

Noting all of this, Guidance watches in disgust as his malfunctioning minion disobeys his orders for the last time. Thus, as Ro-Man throttles Johnny to death, his boss passes final judgment for failure, stating, "If you want to live like a hu-man. You can die like a hu-man!" Then, turning the Calcinator Death-Ray on his former agent, Ro-Man takes a direct hit and quickly crumples over and dies right next to Johnny as the audience slowly realizes that not one, but two, TWO, kids under the age of ten have died quite horribly in this film.

Fed up by these unforeseen circumstances, an enraged Guidance goes on another rampage, bombarding the Earth with even more deadly cosmic rays and who knows what else. And as the world is once more rocked and torn asunder by massive earthquakes, and while two triceratops try to hump one another, a Dimetradon and a T-Rex battle to the death and -- Omigod. Wait. I think the movie’s starting over! But as Guidance continues to rain down death and destruction, we suddenly hear someone calling Johnny’s name as the screen ripples and dissolves until we focus back in on the original reality, with Johnny lying unconscious near the cave entrance.

Calling out that he's found the boy, who has a nice bump on his noggin from the fall he took, Roy checks him over as the others catch up. Johnny is happy to see that they're all still alive, and a relieved Martha invites the archeologists to come and have dinner with them. They agree, and the cave is abandoned. Luckily, the total destruction of Earth was all just a young boy’s head trauma-induced bad dream (-- and you were there. And you. And you were, too. But you, you died. Sorry). Or was it! As the soundtrack turns ominous and -- Oh, no! -- the Great Guidance stalks out of the cave. Not once. Not Twice. But three times before the movie finally decides we’ve finally had enough of this glorious nonsense.

Robot Monster was shot and projected in a dual-strip, polarized 3D format. And with the large and cumbersome equipment needed to pull this off kinda explains why the camera is basically stuck in one spot for every scene and the film is nothing but long takes and master shots. What they did capture did work, however, earning high praise for the gimmick from several sources, including a rather glowing review in Variety, which said, “Judged on the basis of novelty, as a showcase for the Tru-Stereo Process, Robot Monster comes off surprisingly well, considering the extremely limited budget and schedule on which the film was shot. The Tru-Stereo Process (3D) utilized here is easy on the eyes, coming across clearly at all times."

And to the picture’s credit, the article concludes, no 3D gimmicks were employed, meaning nothing was ever purposefully chucked at the camera. Alas, they probably could’ve saved some money and skipped the gimmick altogether but Zimbalist couldn’t have predicted the 3D fad would just as quickly fizzle-out and be displaced by CinemaScope by the end of 1953.

The film also scored a bit of a coup when they landed Jack Rabin to handle the special-effects. Rabin had been working in the field since the mid-1930s, bouncing around several studios, specializing in matte paintings, miniatures, and opticals. In the 1950s, Rabin went freelance with a pair of other FX artists, Louis DeWitt and Irving Block, who all left their fingerprints on many genre movies, both low budget Bs -- Invasion, U.S.A. (1952), Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957), Kronos (1958), and the top-bills -- The Night of the Hunter (1955), The Killing (1956), for the next 20 years or so. And it probably should be noted all of the pilfered FX that appears in Robot Monster were done by either Rabin, DeWitt or Block for another movie.

Thus, Rabin was the key to making the film work, as he was the one who added all the opticals to Robot Monster -- the negative flashes to represent the Calcinator Death-Ray discharging, and added the fog or other foreground objects to give all that stock-footage a fighting chance in 3D. I’m also pretty sure that’s probably him pulling off that Space Platform gag, too, doing the best he could with the five dollars he was allotted. Regardless, that entire sequence is one of the funniest things I have ever seen committed to film. However, Rabin was not responsible for Ro-Man’s hi-tech equipment. No. That Million Dollar Bubble Machine was provided by N.A. Fisher Chemical Products Inc., according to the credits.

Now, at some point, you also probably noticed or noted how the soundtrack for Robot Monster was actually kinda good. And, well, there’s a reason for that. It's fairly common knowledge these days that Elmer Bernstein composed the music for this gonzo classic, and you can hear the talent that would eventually produce the themes for The Ten Commandments (1956), The Magnificent Seven (1960), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), and The Great Escape (1963).

At the time of the production, Bernstein was a young artist struggling to find work due to his leftist politics. And while he was never officially on the Hollywood Blacklist, the Communist witch hunt of that era did find him on the unofficial Graylist. And so, Zimbalist threw him a bone, which also netted him scores for Cat-Women of the Moon and Miss Robin Crusoe (1954), which the producer finally got around to making with Amanda Blake in the lead, co-starring Robot Monster’s other leading man, George Nader. (I’ve seen it, and it's actually pretty good.) Bernstein would later recall that he “enjoyed the challenge of trying to help a film” that needed it, and did what he could with his eight-piece orchestra to glue things together, adding menace and bombast to our ears to overcompensate for what we see with our eyes.

Strangely enough, the Blacklist and other prejudices loomed large over the whole production. Cast member and former MGM stock player Selena Royle’s career was ruined when she was named as a Communist sympathizer in 1951. She had refused to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities but eventually cleared her name. Alas, the damage had been done and Robot Monster would be her last feature.

After making his screen debut here, Nader would go on to win a Golden Globe the very next year for Most Promising Male Newcomer for his work in Four Guns to the Border (1954) and would sign on with Universal. Nader was also a homosexual, who refused to play the game like other actors in the closet and refused to use a beard. "We lived in fear of an exposé, or even one small remark, a veiled suggestion that someone was homosexual," said Nader. "Such a remark would have caused an earthquake at the studio. Every month, when Confidential came out, our stomachs began to turn. Which of us would be it?" Somewhat sadly, these fears came true when Universal threw Nader under the bus to satiate the tabloids in order to save Rock Hudson's career, forcing Nader to pull up stakes and move to Europe, where he continued his acting career.

As for our plucky heroine, Claudia Barret, she signed a contract with Warner Bros in 1949 but never really managed to break-out in the features. Still, she had a solid TV career well into the 1960s. And John Mylong had been playing the same kind of stuffy Continental Kook since Talkies became a thing and would continue to play them for the next 15 years. All of them do a credible job pulling off Ordung’s mind-melting script, which was no small task.

Positively ludicrous at first glance, and the second, and yes, even the third, but once you get past all of the lunacy and begin to analyze how utterly downbeat, and perverted, and nihilistic this film is it’s downright disturbing. I mean, What kind of a madman writes a screenplay where a 8 year old kid dreams about a post-apocalyptic future, whose subconscious calls for his entire family to be brutally massacred and his sister to be bound-up and molested by a robot ape going through an existential crisis?

And yet, as Roderick Heath put it in his review of Robot Monster on the website, This Island Rod, “There’s actual intelligence in the way Tucker and Ordung unfold the story as a system of childish transformations. Johnny’s vision of family at the centre of the universe feels exactly right in grasping this idea, the family unit surrounded by a literal barrier fending off evil and danger. The way he mashes together the concepts floating around in his young mind works in the same way – his bubble-blowing gun becomes the Ro-Man’s bubble-exuding machinery, the tantalizing cave becomes the dark pit from which all the id’s menaces emerge, the Ro-Man merges Johnny’s space-age fantasies with an impression of bestial strength that seems to encapsulate all a child’s understanding of the adult world. The opening credits unfold over a pile of comic books, suggesting the meal of Johnny’s mind and the sources of his protean imagination.” Can’t really argue with any of that.

And so, Robot Monster has a little bit more going on than you might think underneath that gorilla suit and it didn’t really derail anyone’s career, either -- well, with one notable exception, which we’ll be addressing in a second. Because, contrary to popular belief, despite some scathing critical reviews, the film was a bona fide hit when it was first released. Picked up by Astor Pictures it hit theaters in late June of 1953. And to stay ahead of some of those bad reviews as it went national, the picture also played under the more fitting title, Monsters from the Mars. Either way, the film grossed over a million dollars with its initial theatrical release -- and Phil Tucker never saw a dime of any of it.

Yeah, here, The Ballad of Phil Tucker kinda goes off the rails a bit. Of course, another well established urban legend surrounding Robot Monster is that Tucker tried to commit suicide after all the indicting reviews and assumed box office annihilation of his magnum opus. According to Harry Medved’s follow-up book on the worst films of all time, The Golden Turkey Awards (1980), co-authored by his brother, noted film critic, Michael Medved, Tucker “put a gun next to his head, pulled the trigger, and missed.” This is patently false, and the truth is a little more complicated than that.

As far as I can tell after sifting through several newspaper articles, after Robot Monster was released Tucker got into a heated dispute with Zimbalist, who, along with the distributor, were cooking the books, which essentially cheated the director out of his contractual percentage of the film’s profits. Here, after an attempted lawsuit went nowhere, and a follow up feature, Return from Mars, fell through, a disillusioned but undaunted Tucker headed north to Fairbanks, Alaska, where, according to several notices starting in early July and a lengthy article in the August 5, 1953, edition of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, he shot an independent and even lower-budgeted Sci-Fi film called Space Jockey -- a film Tucker would later claim was the “worst picture that’s ever been made by anyone, anywhere."

“The movie industry is stifled in Hollywood,” said Tucker in the interview. “They tell you what to write, how to produce it, when to direct it, who to put in it and when to try and sell it. It's a tight little island of rulers and it's a hard place in which to breathe free.” As to how bad the film actually was, well, we’ll have to take Tucker’s word on that because according to the article the filmmaker hadn’t found a distributor yet, and he apparently never did, and Space Jockey is now considered lost. In fact, there is no real evidence that the film was ever completed.

And I do believe it was this accumulation of a perceived blackballing by the industry and a series of business failures that sent Tucker into a spiraling depression and an undisclosed stint in the psychopathic ward of the Veteran’s Administrations Hospital in West Los Angeles before things reached a crucible on December 15, 1953, at the Knickerbocker Hotel, where a despondent Tucker, on a pass from the V.A., attempted suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills. He was found on the bed, resuscitated, and saved by the timely intervention of the police, who were alerted by a newspaper reporter. Seems Tucker had sent a lengthy suicide note to the publication, how he was screwed over by Zimbalist, lamenting his failures, and his lack of traction in Hollywood, saying, “I finally realized that my future in the film industry was bleak.” Then, after being stabilized in the emergency room of the H.E.H., Tucker was returned to the V.A. hospital for further treatment.

Of course, this flare for the melodramatic brought into question whether all of this was just an elaborate publicity stunt. None other than the aforementioned Ed Wood once commented on how an unnamed filmmaker did this kind of thing to help raise money. “Whenever he finds out his newest bad picture won’t sell, he comes up with the damnedest strategy: suicide,” said Wood. “In one instance, he sat on the roof of a hotel with a can of his film on his lap and his legs dangling over the street fifteen floors below, and then he gobbled down sleeping pills. Of course, the police had been conveniently notified so they arrived in plenty of time."

Was he referring to Tucker? The details don’t quite jive with the article covering the incident found in the December 16, 1953, edition of The Los Angeles Times, but Wood was also one to elaborate and embellish and perhaps was a little jealous that he didn’t think of it first.

Tucker seemed to get his act together a short time after, going back to work for Weiss on another series of burlesque films -- Baghdad After Midnite (1954), Strips Around the World (1955), and teamed up with Lenny Bruce again on Dream Follies (1954). And then there’s his loosely semi-autobiographical take on his own experiences in Hollywood, Broadway Jungle (1955). Long thought lost, having finally seen it, perhaps it should’ve stayed that way. (And if Tucker thought Space Jockey was worse than this? Wow.) And then, sadly, Wood might've been on to something as it appears Tucker would try to kill himself once again in August of 1957 via carbon monoxide poisoning according to a small blurb unearthed from the Des Moines Register.

Luckily, he failed, and Tucker's last time in the director’s chair was for The Cape Canaveral Monsters (1960). However, Tucker shifted gears and stayed in the business as an editor, mostly for episodic TV, and was a post-production supervisor on the features King Kong (1976) and Orca (1977). Sadly, like a lot of other pioneers in low-budget filmmaking of this era, Tucker passed away in 1985 before people really started to appreciate, celebrate, and lionize this kind of schlock and those who made it in the wake of their resurgence on home video.

And to me, Tucker’s Robot Monster definitely deserves its legendary cult status, even though it's nowhere near as bad as its dubious reputation would imply. And if taken at face value, as a child's blunt trauma-induced delirium, then I say it's friggin' brilliant. Yup. If it wasn't obvious enough yet, I truly do love this movie; it is so righteous in its wrongness that one can only watch and boggle as it plays out and transcends its schlocky trappings into something truly remarkable. There's just something about the Shakespearean sincerity when our hero, Ro-Man, tries to profess his doomed love for the hu-man Al-ice, that one can't help but feel sorry for the big lug. So much so that I'm surprised no one has ever tried to combine those elements before, the Bard by way of Barrows and Brown, into one form yet -- until now:

"Hath not a Ro-Man eyes? Hath not a Ro-Man hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same Calcinator Death-Rays, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Hu-Man is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? At what point do these two ideals connect on the graph? Why can this not be in the plan?!? Therefore if we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. We cannot. But we must. For if a Ro-Man wrong a Hu-Man, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Hu-Man wrong a Ro-Man, what should his sufferance be by Hu-Man example? Why, revenge; a revenge most indescribable. Fact: the villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. Foolish hu-mans. There is no escape from me!" -- The Merchant of Ro-Man, Act III Scene I

Honestly, this is the toughest review I’ve ever had to write up since I started this nonsense, because no matter how hard I try, I cannot shake this film. And as I tried to write the plot synopsis, I’d get a few words typed up before images of Ro-Man wandering up and down that same damned hill would filter in my mind's-eye and I would start to giggle. Recovering, I would try again, but then I’d think about all that hi-tech equipment: the million-bubble bubble machine; the sparkler driven Space Platform; the Calcinator Death-Ray -- with its two settings of Painless Surrender Death or Horrible Resistance Death -- and I would burst out laughing. Then, I’d hit the floor, gasping for air, when I thought of Ro-Man and the Great Guidance arguing in a train-wreck of techno-babble that would've made even the most hardened Trekie's head explode.

And then, finally, with all the pathos of Shylock in the Merchant of Venice, as Ro-Man once more professes his love for Al-ice, I must now crawl away from the computer before my head explodes. And you know what? From now on, whenever an intergalactic invader, giant monkey, or any other kind of monster, inexplicably falls in love with an Earth hu-man in a movie or any form of media encountered by me, it will be affectionately referred to as another sad case of Ro-Man's Syndrome.©

Foolish hu-mans! There is no escape from this lunacy! Worst movie of all time? Nay, this is the greatest movie ever made. Seek this movie. Find this movie. Watch this movie. And you will love Robot Monster, too. Trust me.

Well, if you don't know what Hubrisween is by now, Boils and Ghouls, I don't think I can help you. Anyhoo, that's 18 films down with eight yet to go. Up next, Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Florida...

Robot Monster (1953) Three Dimension Pictures :: Astor Pictures / EP: Al Zimbalist / P: Phil Tucker / AP: Alan Winston / D: Phil Tucker / W: Wyott Ordung / C: Jack Greenhalgh / E: Merrill White / M: Elmer Bernstein / S: George Nader, Claudia Barrett, Gregory Moffett, John Mylong, Selena Royle, Pamela Paulson, George Barrows

Hubrisween 2020 :: Q is for Queen of Outer Space (1958)

2020-10-22T00:48:00.001-05:00

In the far-flung future of 1984, three anxious astronauts are loitering outside their commander's office, waiting to find out what they're next assignment will be. Convinced it’s the pending prized expedition to Mars, all three are destined to be disappointed.

Shackled to another "milk run" shuttling the lauded Professor Konrad to his most famous creation -- Space Station-A, orbiting some 20,000 miles above the Earth, and unable to hide their frustration over this, Captain Neal Patterson (Fleming) and his crew are reprimanded by their Commander (Gaylord), who must remind them how every single mission is vitally important in the interest of Earth’s conquest of space. And this one has the utmost urgency, too. For it seems there’s some kind of trouble brewing up there, somewhere in the stars, and there’s no time for explanations; Konrad will just have to fill them in on the way, because they have to launch immediately.

Vital or not, while working through the pre-flight check for their impending blast-off, Lt. Mike Cruze (Willock), the ship's radio-man, is still bitching about this baby-sitting assignment before realizing Konrad (Birch) is already onboard and within earshot. And as Konrad assures him his mission is of grave importance, he tries to light a cigarette, is quickly stopped, and then gets an earful over how the slightest spark could ignite the massive liquid-oxygen tanks stored below. Totally pants'd, Konrad apologizes for this foolishness.

Meanwhile, the fourth member of our expedition is still down on the tarmac, where Lt. Larry Turner (Waltz) says goodbye to his girl, giving her the rigmarole about how he might never come back to the dashing blonde (Lansing). He then tries to vacuum her face off (-- sorry, I can’t quite call that a kiss). Up above in the cockpit, a spying Patterson orders his navigator to shut it off and get his keister onboard.

Once inside, they all strap themselves into their custom Barco-loungers and start the countdown. We then cut to some NASA stock-footage of an Atlas rocket launch and the expedition is soon underway. And as far as stock-footage rocket launches go, this one is pretty impressive -- but inside, the astronauts have either grown extremely constipated or aren't adjusting very well to the resulting G-forces.

When the ship safely reaches orbit, as they plot a course for the space station, Konrad finally begins to elaborate on his top-secret mission. Seems we’re not alone, universally speaking, and there are "deadly neighbors" lurking nearby -- meaning the Earth is in peril!

Almost on cue, Turner raises the alarm as his sensors indicate something is shooting at Space Station-A! On the monitor screen, the crew watches in helpless horror as each laser-blast comes closer and closer to the defenseless orbiter. And when this death-ray finally strikes home, the satellite explodes!

Then, the deadly ray turns on their ship! Evasive maneuvers prove fruitless as the vessel is soon caught in the beam. Luckily, it’s only a tractor beam this time, which seizes the ship and begins to violently tow it at a great rate of speed deeper into space. Unable to take the pressure, the passengers soon pass out as the ship rockets off toward the unknown...

Now, if you're watching the movie along with me, you, like me, are most likely seriously scratching your heads at this point because something seems awfully familiar about what we've seen thus far.

And then it finally hits you: Patterson and his crew are wearing the exact same space-uniforms, side-arms, and hats from Forbidden Planet (1956). And the interior of their ship looks an awful lot like the one used in World Without End (1956). Waitasecond! That IS the interior of the ship from World Without End! And by the time the ship launches, your head’s bleeding and your fingers are gorey stumps from all the scratching as you say, "Hey. That ship doesn’t look like the rocket that launched. In fact, it looks just like the rocket from Flight to Mars (1951)!"

Unfortunately, this will not be the last acute case of recycled footage and props déjà vu we’ll be suffering through while watching Edward Bernds’s Queen of Outer Space (1958).

In truth, the story of Queen of Outer Space's conception and production is probably a lot more interesting and harrowing than what eventually wound-up on screen. See, producer Walter Wanger had been making films since the silents, and his first big talkie was the Marx Brothers inaugural vehicle, The Cocoanuts (1929). And throughout the 1930s and '40s Wanger’s résumé blossomed further with many seminal films, including John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940), and Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945).

When the 1950s rolled around, Wanger was soon interested in the resurgent science-fiction boom and commissioned a script from Ben Hecht, who had written for the likes of Otto Preminger -- Whirlpool (1950), Where the Sidewalk Ends, Howard Hawks -- His Girl Friday (1940), Monkey Business (1952), and Hitchcock -- Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), and served as an uncredited ghostwriter on everything from Gone with the Wind (1939) to The Thing from Another World (1951). And so, Hecht turned in a ten page treatment called Queen of the Universe; a satire about a planet run entirely by women and how badly they louse it up. And it was while Wanger was shopping this proposal around to several studios for financing when things first started to go a little awry.

Married to actress Joan Bennet back in 1940, their honeymoon didn’t last long as Wanger was convinced she was having an affair from the I dos on with her long time agent, Jennings Lang. And so convinced was Wanger of this infidelity, he started stalking them both until, on the afternoon of December 13, 1951, he took two shots at Lang with a pistol while the man was standing outside Bennet's parked car, hitting him in the thigh and in the groin.

Fortunately for Lang, and Wanger as well, the wounds were not fatal. Unfortunately for Wanger, he chose to shoot Lang right across the street from a police station. Pleading temporary insanity, Wanger wound up serving only four months for his crime of passion. But after he got out, the only studio that would touch him was Allied Artists -- formerly known as Monogram, one of the last stops on Poverty Row; and it was there that he got back on his feet with Riot in Cell-Block 11 (1954), which was based on his time in stir, and the Red Scare genre classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), both directed by Don Siegel.

As for Hecht's treatment for Queen of the Universe? Well, it eventually fell into the hands of Ben Schwalb, who had mostly produced animated shorts and Bowery Boy features for Sam Katzman over at Columbia. Turning Hecht’s treatment over to Charles Beaumont to expand it into a feature, the new scribe, who would go on to write a ton of episodes of The Twilight Zone, essentially junked most of the satire for some standard sci-fi fare of that era.

Still not satisfied, Schwalb wanted more laughs; and so, brought in his gag-man, Elwood Ullman, who, along with eventual director Edward Bernds, had collaborated on a ton of Three Stooges shorts.

Thus and so, with a script punched-up to within an inch of its life, shooting finally commenced. And as a former Columbia man, I'm sure it was Schwalb who pushed to recycle all those props and costumes to save as much money as possible. Add all that up, and it should be no surprise that Queen of Outer Space is kind of a big old sloppy mess. We've seen plenty of evidence to back that up already, but the best/worst is yet to come, Boils and Ghouls. I mean, We haven't even gotten to the planet of the Glamazons yet. So, read on: Bochino! Bochino!

Anyhoo, when that tractor beam finally cuts out, Patterson's ship and her unconscious crew silently drift on until seized by an unknown planetoid’s gravity, and then crashes into some snowy mountains (-- borrowing yet another sequence from World Without End). And when the crew finally recovers, they make a few startling discoveries:

First, the radio has been destroyed in the crash, and second, they don’t need any pressure-suits because, wherever they are, the planet has sufficient oxygen levels and comparable gravity to Earth. (And if they find a half-buried Statue of Liberty, I’m stopping this review right now!)

Now, Konrad has a hunch as to where they might be but first wants to explore a little further so he can be sure. Thus, making their way off the peak, these explorers soon find themselves in a strange world of plastic alien vegetation. And then, after studying one plant, Konrad concludes they’re on the planet Venus (-- okay, What exactly is he a professor of?). But the rest of the crew protest that this is impossible (-- and for the record, so do I!). Also disturbed by a total lack of ambient sound, this soon changes when a deafening energy-discharge roars overhead. And though Konrad takes this as a good sign, meaning there must be some kind of intelligent life residing on Venus, Turner worries about those deadly little green men like he's read about in the comics.

Later, after making camp for the night, Cruze dozes off during his watch, allowing them to be surrounded by a pack of good looking legs in plastic pumps and mini-skirts. When the sentry wakes up, surrounded by a gang of ray-gun toting women, Cruze thinks he’s hallucinating at first but then goes for his gun, which is quickly blasted out of his hand and disintegrated. This commotion wakes everyone else up, but they're all quickly captured and hauled off.

And as they're marched into a great, matte-painted city, to the crew’s surprise, it turns out these Venusian women understand English. But this does them little good as, once inside, they draw an irritable crowd, who scream hateful epitaphs at them, until the most hostile locals are restrained before things get even uglier. When Patterson wonders aloud on what that was all about, Turner suggests they probably just hate men. And with that, Konrad makes an astute observation: Where are all the Venusian men?

Herded into a main tribunal chamber, they hope to get an answer. And while awaiting the arrival of the ruling council, the Earth men and Venusian women exchange much ogling at each other's various nooks and crannies. Now, being stuck on a planet with apparently no other men, slime-ball Turner feels he’s in heaven. But when Patterson asks Konrad to elaborate on that possibility, the professor professes that a civilization with no sex is no civilization at all. (Hear! Hear!)

Suddenly, several bejeweled masked women enter through a curtain and take their seats behind the dais. At the center, the mysterious Queen Yllana (Mitchell) orders the Earthlings to state their business. Stepping forward, Patterson apologizes for crashing on their planet, but, if given time to repair the ship, they’d be more than happy to leave. Unimpressed, Yllana goes ballistic and accuses them of being spies sent from Earth to prepare an invasion. Rebuffed and told they are here on a peaceful mission, the Queen says that’s impossible: the Venusians have been monitoring the Earth for years (-- that's how they know English), and find the denizens there very barbaric and belligerent; therefore, they must be neutralized and expunged from the galaxy with extreme prejudice!

Meanwhile, in the city’s science lab, Talleah (Gabor) stares blankly at some bubbling equipment when her friend, Motiya (Davis), brings word of the Earth-men’s capture. Here, Talleah insists she must talk to them, and then resumes staring. (Get used to that expression, folks. It's all she's got.)

Back at the tribunal, Yllana brands the Earth-men liars and spies; and if they won’t fess-up, promises them the horror of TORTURE! But first, she gives them time to think about it before answering. And so, in their holding cell, as the other men try to formulate an escape plan, Konrad expounds on the monstrously evil vibe coming off Yllana and believes she’s the one responsible for Space Station-A's destruction. But Turner scoffs, saying women could never invent, let alone aim, such a device. (Har! Har! Shoot him. Shoot him now.)

When the cell door slides open, Talleah brings both food and a quick Venusian history lesson: Translating from her thick accent, we can confirm they are indeed on the planet Venus. And it seems Venus had been at war with the planet Mordu, and this conflict nearly destroyed both worlds. Eventually, Venus won out but at great cost. And in the dire and deadly aftermath, the women, led by Yllana, took over the planet, sparing only a few men, who were then banished to one of Venus’s moons, while all the rest of the males were "disposed of."

Talleah then claims she wants to help them escape. Seems some of the girls aren’t very happy with this new society and want to bring the men back. She also warns that Yllana, who has nothing but hatred in her heart, has developed a new and even deadlier weapon; and if she gets her way, "Der Ert vil be destroyeded." -- I mean, The Earth will be destroyed! So, for all their sake, the Queen must be dethroned. But how?

Before they can figure that out, word comes that Yllana wants to have a private meeting with Patterson. Konrad feels this might be her Achilles Heel and tells the Captain to turn on the charm and schmooze the Queen into submission. Of course, when Turner thinks he should go, feeling he has more sex appeal (-- dear Flying Spaghetti Monster? Please let him get eaten by a giant plant or something), Patterson promises to do his best as he's escorted out. (You’d better mister. Der Ert is depending on your sex appeal.) Once he's gone, Talleah quickly devolves into a jealous snit.

Cut to the Queen's private chamber, where Patterson and Yllana play the game of Who’s Seducing Whom. Eventually, our hero gets the upper hand -- because even Queens can get lonely. When asked to take her golden mask off, she shies away and turns cranky again.

Queen Bi-Polar then turns on a view-screen, revealing her new Beta Disintegrator that will be used to destroy der Ert. (Dammit. Now she’s got ME doing it.) But with a little applied psychology, Patterson deduces some man once did something really bad to Yllana -- is this why she’s denying all love and substituting hatred?

Her defenses broken, she swoons; and as he takes her into his arms, Patterson pulls the mask off -- but quickly recoils in horror!

Seems Yllana's face was burned and disfigured -- badly, by radiation during the war with Mordu and this has fueled her irrational hatred of men ever since. Asking if he could still love her, she tries to kiss him. When he winces and turns away, the Queen calls for her guards.

And after he's dragged off, Yllana looks into a mirror and, in a surprising touch of pathos, breaks down into mournful sobbing at her hideous visage.

Once Patterson is back in the cell, the boys are sprung by Talleah and two of her friends. With only two days left before Yllana blows up der Ert, they formulate a plan to destroy the Beta Disintegrator with the help of Talleah’s rebels. And what follows is a hilarious Scooby-Dooesque chase scene as they try to avoid the Queen’s guards. (I’m telling you, Stormtroopers are more observant than these gals.)

Making their way outside the city, the fugitives take refuge in a cave. Safe for the moment, because the Queen’s sensors can’t detect them under all that rock, they explore deeper into the caverns -- where Turner is jumped by a giant spider. (WOHOO! Thank you, Giant Flying Spaghetti Monster! Go spider! Eat him! Bite his head off!) But Turner is saved (-- aw, poop!), and the spider is crispered with a ray-gun.

And yup, that spider was yet another recycled prop from World Without End. And that same unreasonable facsimile of a spider would be pressed into action yet again a few years later in another Edward Bernds highly pilfered sci-fi pot-boiler, Valley of the Dragons (1961).

That night, after they all pair-up (-- except for poor, lonely Konrad), while Turner and Cruze try to vacuum the faces off their girls, Patterson and Talleah make small talk. Asked why she came with them, she answers there is no life without love, or children, and was kind of hoping that maybe his men and her friends could maybe start civilization over some place else. Probing further, she asks if he ever had a girlfriend back on der Ert. When he says no, the conversation really starts to heat up as Patterson comments on her beauty; she’s glad he finally noticed; and then they start vacuuming each other’s face and swap some spit.

Alas, with all that necking and tongue-action, the unattended campfire starts to die down. Here, each man pulls rank, telling the other to get more firewood until a cranky Konrad volunteers and ventures outside -- and runs smack into a passing patrol! Trapped, they try the oldest trick in the book as the men give the girls their ray-guns back and fake their own capture. Amazingly, Talleah manages to get this bluff past the pursuing guards and demands to take the prisoners to the Queen herself.

Meanwhile, Yllana is vaporizing those who helped the ert men escape and admiring her giant, day-glow Tinker Toy set -- sorry, her Beta Disintegrator. Commanding her engineers to finish the preparations more quickly, because her irradiated blood is up, she then receives word of der Ert-men’s capture and orders they be brought to her quarters immediately.

Once they're delivered, Talleah tells the rest of the guards to stay outside and takes the prisoners in by herself. Inside, Yllana gloats that she will force the Ert-men to watch the destruction of their world first, and then she will kill them all -- very slowly.

Not so fast, your Majesty! For when Talleah turns her ray-gun on Yllana, the revolution has officially begun! And with the Queen captured, they demand she suspend work on the Beta Disintegrator and to issue an order that all the men are to be brought back from exile. Not amused, Yllana can’t believe this degree of treachery and disloyalty, but Talleah reads her the riot act about peace without contentment is no peace at all (-- blah blah blah, we aren't getting any, blah blah blah etc. etc.)

After pitching a fit, Yllana throws herself onto her bed. But this was all a ruse as she secures a hidden ray-gun from underneath a pillow and manages to get one wild shot off before being overpowered and restrained. And once she's subdued, since their earlier ruse worked, Patterson decides to try another hair-brained idea.

Donning one of the royal dresses, Talleah then takes Yllana's mask and puts it on. Taking it in, Patterson swears they could be twins. (But I think that goulash-accent is going to give you away there, Einstein.) After restraining and gagging their captive and tossing her behind a screen, Talleah calls the guards in.

But as she starts to order them around, Yllana manages to kick the screen over. With that, the guards free her and everybody’s captured again.

Now royally pissed off, Yllana orders them all to be taken to the Beta-Disintegrator chamber for front row seats and an unobstructed view of der Ert's destruction. As they're marched out, she offers Patterson one last chance to be with her. When he refuses, Yllana informs Talleah that she will die last.

Herded in front of a giant view-screen showing a tranquil and unsuspecting Ert, the men watch helplessly as the machine is powered up and primed to fire. But when Yllana punches the big red shiny button, the machine fizzles out!

Seems Talleah's fifth column is more widespread than we thought and has gummed up the works. And while the Queen rushes into the control room to try a manual override, Talleah’s cohorts jump the guards and a pretty hilarious melee ensues.

This scrum-pile-up continues until the Beta Disintegrator violently overloads and self-destructs, taking Yllana with it (-- rather gruesomely, I might add), and all hostilities cease.

Several days later, after Talleah is installed as the new leader of Venus, the Venusian men are now on their way back down and der Ertlings ship has been repaired, meaning they will be leaving shortly. As Cruze and Turner resume face vacuuming their respective ladies, the new Queen asks Patterson, Why must they go. (Yeah, Why go?) The answer: Sorry, honey, duty calls.

But then Talleah receives some good news. Having established contact with der Ert, Patterson and his men are ordered not to risk a journey home in the repaired ship. Instead, a rescue party will be dispatched to retrieve them -- the catch being it'll take at least a year to get there. As everybody else resumes swapping spit, we then cut to Konrad, surrounded by five doting women that take turns kissing him on the forehead, who happily exclaims, "A whole year!"

Queen of Outer Space is one big vat of industrial-strength cinematic cheese. Government cheese. Chemically developed cheese with no natural products in it whatsoever. Cheese from a test tube of unknown origin, that’s Queen of Outer Space alright.

Unleashed in 1958, the absolute zenith of the "martini machismo" that had gripped the country that decade, this interstellar Battle of the Sexes is filled with so much innuendo, misogynistic ideals, and macho posturing it is absolutely hilarious to behold and endure. Things were so steamy the film was indicted by the National League of Decency over its themes and “suggestive costuming."

Apart from the sexual snits and mostly vain attempts at actual comedy and social commentary, the film is your typical Sci-Fi fair of the era of its origin. Sharing a lot of similarities, plot-wise, with the likes of Charles Lamont’s Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953), Arthur Hilton’s Catwomen of the Moon (1953) and Cy Roth’s Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1956), despite it’s recycled parts, this film still falls into a category I like to call Sanitized Science Fiction:

Awash in bright primary colors, every brightly lit room and death-ray is immaculately clean in this alien world. And though their technology is very aesthetically pleasing, it's not very practical or grounded in scientific feasibility. And, of course, all the Venusian women are long-legged beauties, wear mini-skirts and saddled with high heels.

The cast for the most part is fine. I always liked Eric Fleming's take on trail boss Gil Favor in the TV series Rawhide, and he delivers the goods as the square-jawed hero. And more importantly, he also treats his leading lady with kid gloves as Zsa Zsa Gabor was hired for her looks and nothing else, and her inexperience shows badly.

Yes, she does look smashing in that dress slit-up to her nether regions but she couldn’t act her way out of a wet paper bag. When not choking on her accent, trying to get her lines out, watch and boggle as she just blankly stares at ... well, something, and then tenses up before delivering her next line. Luckily, the script doesn’t call on her to do a whole lot except fill out her wardrobe and swoon over Fleming.

Faring much better, Laurie Mitchell does a fantastic job with the highly damaged Yllana. I think there was a real and really interesting character there that could and should’ve been expanded upon. Alas, the script wimps out on her and she has to resort to the stereotypical shrilly villainess; but thanks to her performance, Yllana's ultimate and overly-grotesque demise still packs a wallop.

On the Warner DVD commentary, Mitchell claims she got along fine with Gabor, but other sources claim that the difficult star might’ve been more trouble than she was worth. According to a later interview with Bernds, most of the other Venusians were beauty contest winners; and when the crew paid too much attention to them the more "testy" his leading lady became. In fact, he stated Gabor was such a pain in the ass that Schwalb wound up in the hospital with stomach ulcers.

But aside from its temperamental star, the only real knock on the film is that everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, else in Queen of Outer Space is recycled and it sticks out badly. The sets -- which seem constantly on the verge of falling over, the props, the costumes -- those aforementioned uniforms and most of those Venusian dresses were pilfered from Altaira's closet in Forbidden Planet; and even the script borrows heavily from everyone’s earlier work. Bernds own World Without End gets the hatchet the worst -- a pretty good film all by itself, and is one of the first [SPOILERS!] "Omigod, we’re still on Earth'' scenarios put to film.

Admittedly, I've danced around a couple of sore spots on the Battle of the Sexes this film brings to the surface and then pummels relentlessly. Yes, Queen of Outer Space is wrong, so very, very wrong in its portrayal of women but its portrayal of men as hormone crazed idiots isn't very flattering, either.

In the end, I believe everyone should be treated the same. Sure, we have a long, long way to go before this kind of equality is truly achieved, unlocked, and we all move to the next level; no one will argue against that. But if you use Queen of Outer Space as a measuring stick, you cannot deny that we have advanced things at least a teeny-tiny bit since 1958.

Well, if you don't know what Hubrisween is by now, Boils and Ghouls, I don't think I can help you. Anyhoo, that's 17 films down with nine yet to go. Up next, We face a choice between a painless surrender death or the horrors of a resistance death. Either way, we're still dead. Be there!

Queen of Outer Space (1958) Allied Artists / P: Ben Schwalb / D: Edward Bernds / W: Charles Beaumont, Edward Bernds, Ben Hecht (story) / C: William P. Whitley / E: William Austin / M: Marlin Skiles / S: Zsa Zsa Gabor, Eric Fleming, Laurie Mitchell, Paul Birch, Dave Willock, Patrick Waltz, Lisa Davis

Hubrisween 2020 :: P is for Phoenix Forgotten (2017)

2020-10-21T00:15:00.002-05:00

After a brief cacophonous montage of overlapping images culled from several TV news sources, we cut to a slightly more serene video of an outdoor cookout dated March 13, 1997, held in celebration of a young girl’s 6th birthday.

Shot by her older brother, Josh, on a camcorder, he gathers video well-wishes and testimonials from their parents, grandparents, and other friends until their mom wrestles the camera away and turns it on her son, forcing him to say something nice about his little sister, Sophie, on camera, too. Honestly, Josh doesn’t mount much of a protest over these demands, but before he can say anything the video pauses and a voiceover cryptically says this would be the last time the Bishops were ever all together as a family.

We then cut to the Phoenix airport, where we meet the person behind that voice, Sophie Bishop (Hartigan), now 26, who has returned home with her cameraman, Jay (Keitel), in tow, filming her every move. Her father, Steve (Jordan), picks them up.

And when he asks what the camera is for, Sophie reveals she is in the process of making a documentary about Josh, which gets a physical reaction from their dad -- and not a pleasant one.

Now, at this point I will pause and point out that we are not watching the “making of” efforts of Sophie’s documentary but the completed documentary itself as the film constantly cuts between newer footage and interviews shot by Sophie and Jay, Josh’s old videos, and archival news footage, which is what we cut to next for another montage that reveals the delicate and touchy nature of the subject matter of this “proposed” documentary: how Josh and two of his friends, Ashley Foster and Mark Abrams, essentially disappeared into the desert without a trace two decades ago. And while the case is still open, all possible leads have long since dried up and left the moribund investigation mired in an insurmountable pile-up of dead-ends.

Thus, this unexplained disappearance has haunted the Bishop family and left a very deep scar, too, as we quickly suss out her parents are separated, in the process of getting acrimoniously divorced, and selling off the old house -- too many triggering memories there, I guess. In fact, Steve declines to even enter the house. But her mom, Caroline (Strittmatter), is there, and after exchanging hugs we see everything is all packed up and ready to move -- except for Josh’s room, which has remained untouched since he left that fateful morning never to return. Caroline could not face the task alone, and is glad for Sophie’s help, who asks if she still has all of Josh’s old tapes. She does.

Apparently, Josh (Roberts) fancied himself as an amateur auteur and his video camera was constantly on and welded to his hand. And after digging through an old shoe-box full of tapes, Sophie finds the one she’s looking for, which we see is marked “Sophie’s 6th Birthday” on the label -- only that is scribbled out, with the words “Phoenix Lights” written above it as she pushes it into the VCR.

And as the images find a track and flicker to life on the TV, we cut back to her birthday party, where Josh is about to say what he loves about her so much, when suddenly, everyone's attention is drawn to the night sky, where a strange formation of lights appear and hover over the city of Phoenix, Arizona.

Here, Josh wrests the camera away from his mom and excitedly captures the v-shaped phenomenon on tape before the lights slowly disappear. Convinced they all just witnessed a bona fide UFO, the gathered others don’t quite share Josh’s conviction or enthusiasm -- especially his dad, who believes it was probably just the military out on maneuvers. But then, almost on cue, two fighter jets roar over the house from behind them at an extremely low and dangerous altitude on an intercept course to where the lights were last seen, convincing Josh more than ever that what they saw was not of this Earth.

Josh’s footage soon makes the family semi-famous, too, as they make the local news, where he and his father are interviewed on TV and recount what they saw that night while Josh’s tape of the Lights is broadcast over the airwaves on several outlets. But the tone of the coverage soon switches from awe and wonder to rationalism and skepticism when the official explanation for these mystery lights is released, saying they were nothing more than misidentified military flares shot-off during a training exercise.

Not buying this cover-up for a second, Josh is soon obsessed with finding out the truth -- the real truth. And so, armed with his trusty camera, as always, the impulsive teenager makes the fateful decision to get to the bottom of this mystery and prove what those Lights really were. And it was in pursuit of this truth that led Josh and the others out into the desert.

As to what happened next, well, no one can say for sure. But his sister is determined to find out. And one can only hope as she doggedly attempts to retrace Josh and the others’ final steps on that last day, trying desperately to fill in one big critical gap in the timeline that could unlock the whole thing, that Sophie doesn’t wind up sharing the same fate as her brother in her own obsessive search for the truth...

The first known sighting of what would come to be ubiquitously known as The Phoenix Lights actually took place in Henderson, Nevada, on March 13, 1997, where a man reported spotting a large V-shaped object in the night sky around 7:55pm, about the size of a Boeing 747, with six visible lights running the length of the leading edge, silently moving to the southeast. About twenty minutes later, a similar object was reported by a former police officer near Paulden, Arizona, which is about 200 miles southeast of Henderson, which is just south of Las Vegas. Here, the witness reported a cluster of four alternating reddish and orange lights with a fifth light trailing behind them, making him believe they were from two separate sources, which he continued to observe through binoculars until the lights disappeared over the mountains, still moving south by southeast, toward Prescott Valley.'

Sometime later, The National UFO Reporting Center received the following witness statement from the same area dated the same day and same time-frame from an amateur photographer, who was out shooting pictures of the night sky: “I observed five yellow-white lights in a "V" formation moving slowly from the northwest, across the sky to the northeast, then turn almost due south and continue until out of sight. The point of the "V" was in the direction of movement. The first three lights were in a fairly tight "V" while two of the lights were further back along the lines of the "V"'s legs. During the NW-NE transit one of the trailing lights moved up and joined the three and then dropped back to the trailing position. I estimated the three light "V" to cover about 0.5 degrees of sky and the whole group of five lights to cover about 1 degree of sky.”

Around this same time, John Kaiser was outside with his wife and sons in Prescott Valley when they noticed the lights, too, which they claimed formed a triangular pattern as it silently flew directly overhead and then disappeared over the horizon, still moving to the southeast, toward Glendale and Phoenix. Tim Ley and his family also observed the lights moving through Prescott Valley, and would later describe five distinct lights attached to what he called a carpenter’s square -- a V-shaped tool, until it disappeared over Squaw Peak, moving toward the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, where, revealed in a later interview with the BBC, actor Kurt Russell was in the process of landing his private plane when he spotted the mystery object, too, and reported this sighting to the control tower.

Multiple witnesses in the western suburbs of Glendale saw the object pass overhead, partially obscured by clouds, between 8:30 and 8:45pm as it finally reached Phoenix proper, where thousands of witnesses observed what was collectively described as a large angular craft -- some claims put it at nearly a mile long, blotting out the other stars as it hovered silently for nearly two hours, demarcated by those lights, which had now increased to nine, and were described by some as “canisters of swimming light” embedded in the underbelly of the craft, which purportedly undulated -- as if looking through water. From there, the craft continued on to the southeast around 11pm, where it was spotted again near Tucson as it continued south, which was verified later by multiple sightings in Sonora, Mexico, before the craft finally vanished for good.

And while there were thousands of eye-witnesses, who clogged up phone lines to TV stations, newspapers, the police, and Luke Air Force Base, wanting to know what it in the hell that was, and while multiple photos and videos of this close encounter were shot, the incident barely made a ripple outside of the Phoenix area until a follow-up feature ran nearly two months later on the front page of the June 18, 1997, edition of the USA Today, which featured an artist rendition of the mystery craft.

And then the whole thing kind of blew up, and the sighting officially became a cause célèbre in UFO circles, as people called for a federal investigation to explain what the object was and where it came from, leading to the infamous news conference from then Arizona Governor Fife Symington, who declared they had caught the culprit and then marched out one of his aides dressed up as an alien, while the whole thing was written off as misidentified military flares launched from a squadron of A-10 Warthogs, suspended in the air by parachutes, dropped by members of the Maryland Air National Guard, currently visiting the Davis-Monthan AFB and participating in a training exercise held at the Barry Goldwater Bombing Range in western Pima county.

And while that was enough explanation for some, it was not for all -- especially with those earlier sightings in Prescott Valley, including, strangely enough, ex-Governor Symington, who later apologized for his role in trivializing the mass sighting in a later interview in The Prescott Daily Courier, where he claimed to be a witness of the phenomenon himself. "I'm a pilot and I know just about every machine that flies,” said Symington. “It was bigger than anything that I've ever seen. Other people saw it, responsible people ... And it couldn't have been flares because it was too symmetrical. It had a geometric outline, a constant shape. It was enormous and inexplicable. Who knows where it came from?"

Now, as all of this caught fire, one person who was keenly interested in these sightings was a young teenager named Justin Barber. “I was a high school kid when the Phoenix Lights happened,” Barber later related in an April, 2017, interview with Kathie Huddleston for SyFy.com. “It was a peak time for X-Files, and the '90s was big for UFOs. I was always drawn to that material and those types of stories. Like a lot of people who loved sci-fi, growing up as a kid in the suburbs of Florida you just want the world to be more exciting, more fantastic than it is."

After graduating high school, Barber attended Florida State University, where he met Wes Ball and T.S. Nowlin. All three remained friends post-college and wound up working in the film industry in some capacity. Ball and Barber in art direction and visual effects, who worked together on a series of Star Trek shorts in 2009. Nowlin, meanwhile, was a screenwriter, who helped adapt James Dashner’s Maze Runner novels into a feature film franchise -- The Maze Runner (2014), Maze Runner: Scorch Trials (2015), Maze Runner: The Death Cure (2018), on which Ball made his directorial debut.

As far back as 1999, when Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999) hit big, caused a national phenomenon in viral marketing, and made found footage films a going concern, Ball and Nowlin began kicking around the idea of doing a similar cinema verite project centered around a close encounter with a UFO while they were still in college. What they envisioned was something that started out as “a documentary at first, then goes off the rails and becomes a found footage ride.” And this idea simmered for nearly fifteen years until it resurfaced again around 2015, when Ball and Nowlin started getting some traction in Hollywood, where they brought in Barber due to his recent work on a couple of documentary films for ESPN’s 30 for 30 anthology program.

“I loved the original Blair Witch Project,” said Barber. “It's very authentic; and now twenty years later we live in this age where there is a lot of saturation with movies like that and I think more often than not they don't quite have the same authenticity that the progenitor had. We really just wanted to nail that.” And so, Barber and Nowlin started hashing out a treatment. And while it started as just a random encounter between three teens and a UFO, Barber got the idea to really play up the “Based on a true story” angle as Myrick and Sánchez had done so brilliantly, giving it an air of authenticity.

Digging back into his own past, Barber suggested they base it around The Phoenix Lights sighting instead of something like the Gulf Breeze incidents in his native Florida, feeling the desert provided a better backdrop. “I did a lot of research,” said Barber. “I went to Phoenix, talked to real eyewitnesses and real experts."

But to be fair and honest, what they came up with for Phoenix Forgotten (2017) was still a pretty shameless groping of The Blair Witch Project, where Barber and Nowlin’s script tries to hide their filed-off serial numbers as a documentary tucked inside another documentary wrapped up in a found footage movie. But where Phoenix Forgotten starts to differentiate itself from the originator of the species, with the ingenious way it was set up, is how it allows us to get to know these characters before the shit retroactively hits the fan. For unlike Heather, Josh and Mike, who were, lets face it, nothing but three insufferable assholes that got lost in the woods, we actually kinda like Josh, Ashley and Mark, which is only reinforced by the loss and suffering felt by those they left behind, which is where Barber’s film truly excels.

And as they stuck their fictional characters into a fictional story plugged into an actual event, the family melodrama was a key from the beginning. “When you look at E.T., when you look at Close Encounters, there's just enough interpersonal turmoil to draw you into the characters a little bit, so that later, when they're on the found footage ride, it's more impactful because you actually care about them more. A lot of these [found footage] movies are horror movies. I remember the suspenseful situations and the scary monster, but less so the characters. And I just wanted to make a movie where the characters were more unique and memorable."

Once the script was finished, Barber cut together a proof of concept trailer for Phoenix Forgotten, editing together a news footage mock-up for his missing teens, and they began to shop it around. And then fate sorta stepped in when Nowlin found himself in the offices of Scott Free Productions on another project and wound up in a room with Ridley Scott -- Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982), saw an opportunity, and pitched him the movie. Scott was intrigued and “the subject matter appealed to him, but also even the very iterations of the story -- the very suspenseful ride, it felt like a noose tightening around the necks of these characters, and it built to this big finish.” Couple that with the fact his production company had been looking to latch onto one of these low-budget horror productions, Scott gave them a greenlight to proceed. He, Ball and Nowlin would produce -- along with about a dozen others, and Barber was put in charge of directing it.

Inspired by the documentaries of Werner Herzog -- Grizzly Man (2005), Into the Inferno (2016), Errol Morris -- Gates of Heaven (1978), The Fog of War (2003), Tabloid (2010), and especially Moria Demos and Laura Ricciardi’s recent series, Making a Murderer (2015-2018), Barber lays out a solid foundation for the film as he slowly plays out his poker hand, with Sophie’s documentary laying the groundwork, metering out what we know and when we knew it.

And through her we find out how Josh met Ashley Foster when Sophie pulls out a tape marked “Vox Populi” and plays it next, where we see her brother hunting for other eye-witnesses who saw the Lights and interviews them -- some more credible than others. This includes Ashley (Lopez), who never actually saw the Lights, and yet Josh keeps on asking her more questions, and appreciates the interviewing tips she offers to help him on his quest. Showing a natural affinity for the camera, after she relates the biblical UFO story of Ezekiel and the Wheel, Josh lets her go but the camera lingers on Ashley as the girl walks away.

Obviously, Josh has developed an instant-crush. And when Sophie interviews Ashley’s parents, Jack and Melissa Foster (Carerra, Jackson), they say she tended to have that effect on people; a tenacious, compassionate, and gentle soul, who always had time to listen to other people’s woes. Which made her perfect lawyer material to her father, while her mother always saw a crusading reporter -- exemplified by her high school roving reporter videos, which are also incorporated into Sophie’s documentary. But when she asks what they thought of Josh, neither had ever met him. And they honestly had no idea what they were working on.

Apparently intrigued by what Josh was doing, Ashley decided to help out with his research into UFOs, ancient aliens, and crop circles, and eventually signed on as a producer and possible co-director of a documentary film about the Phoenix Lights.

Their first official interview was with two members of The Phoenix Astronomical Society (Marron, Boyd), who agree to look at Josh’s raw tape of the Lights. They come away a tad disappointed, here, when both men agree what they’re looking at are indeed a bunch of flares suspended on the ends of parachutes.

Probing further, they next interview a Native American (Duncan), who relates some old folklore of the area about the Sky People; from whom his tribe descended. And then things really perk up when he mentioned how he used to see the same kind of lights all the time out at the Salt River Reservation. Thus, it doesn’t take much to talk Ashley into taking a trip out to the desert. The problem is, how do they get there since neither of them have a car. Not to worry, says Josh, he’s got a few ideas on that.

Enter Mark Abrams (Matthews), and more importantly, Mark’s Jeep Grand Cherokee. A friend of Josh’s since grade school, a Boy Scout his whole life, and familiar with the area, Mark agrees to take the other two tenderfoots out to the Reservation and chaperone them into the desert for a quick tour to see what they can see. And after an evening of preparations and microwavable burritos, news breaks on the TV that the Lights have returned! Recognizing the area near Mesa, the two pile into the Jeep and head out into the night. But by the time they arrive, the Lights are long gone.

However, they do spy a searchlight scanning the sky from a nearby hill and investigate the source, stumbling upon some kind of official operation attended by several deputies, men in protective gear, and cars with no license plates. Making too much noise, they are discovered but manage to get away without being caught.

Rushing home, Josh excitedly pulls out a map of the area, takes a magic marker and marks an X where his family first saw the Lights, and then marks another where the Lights were spotted tonight, and then a third X for where they’re headed tomorrow. The Reservation. He then draws a straight line connecting all three, convinced this flight pattern will lead them right to the UFO.

Cut back to the present for a series of interviews with local law enforcement and those who worked on the case of the missing teens, who break down the investigation from the beginning to its open end. The lead investigator, Detective Jay Pirouznia of the Phoenix PD, now retired, always found it strange to have three kids go missing all at once. Usually one, or two, but seldom three.

She also talks to Kevin Boontjer, another retired Phoenix police officer and pilot, who led the aerial search of the desert, who gives Sophie a tour of the area from his plane, showing the spot where Mark’s Jeep was found. Then, Walter Garza, a retired deputy of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department, drives her to the exact spot where the car was found and describes the scene, which gave up a lot of evidence but not a lot of clues as to what happened.

What they know for sure is that on the morning of March 22, 1997, Mark and Josh picked up Ashley at her house at 7:30am on the day of their disappearance. The Jeep was then found by a passing patrolman, abandoned on the side of the road on March 23 at 1:35am. The car was locked, and would later prove to still be in working order. Inside they found several empty beer cans, some traces of blood on the floor underneath the steering wheel -- later determined to be Mark’s, and her brother’s camera.

And with a combination of surveillance video from several stops along the way and the tape recovered with Mark’s camera, they were able to trace their movements and determined where they went up to when that tape ran out, which was almost 11 miles from where they eventually found the Jeep, leaving a huge gap in the timeline where they have no idea what happened next or ultimately what happened to them. An extensive search of the desert area took place, lasting for over two weeks, but not one single trace or sign of the missing was ever found. And despite pleas from the families for help and any information, no one came forward.

Thus, all they can do now is speculate. Did they just wander too far into the desert and get irrevocably lost? Of course, with the blood evidence found, they can’t rule out foul play. Were they abducted? Did they see something they shouldn’t have? Drug dealers? Were they caught in the wrong place at the wrong time? There’s even persistent speculation that the dynamic of the group holds the key -- two boys, one girl, with someone getting jealous, and then things just got out of hand from there and the last one standing has been on the run ever since. Regardless, it’s been 20 years with no sign of anyone, and the general consensus is that all three are most likely dead out there somewhere in the desert, waiting for someone to stumble upon the bones.

And that is the true purpose of Sophie’s documentary, to try and shore up that gap and find out what really happened out there, but she keeps running into the exact same dead-ends. But as the case went cold and the years passed, his camera and the last tape of film Josh most likely ever shot wound up back in the Bishop’s possession.

And when Sophie scours through the footage, she is puzzled over how the tape ends just as they seemingly arrived at their destination. Surely they wouldn’t have driven all the way out to the Salt River Reservation and then stopped filming? Was there a second tape? Or, as some of the footage suggests, was there a second camera?

Turns out the investigators thought of that, too, feeling Josh would’ve never just left the camera in the Jeep on purpose; but again, they found nothing. Feeling this might just be the break they’ve needed for so long, Sophie pushes further, checking in at Josh’s old high school, to see if there are any records of Josh or Ashley checking out a camera that weekend. She talks to Luisa Moreno (Dela Cruz), who’s now in charge of the school’s AV equipment. But she’s only been on the job for five years and the records she has do not go back that far, meaning this is just another in a long line of heartbreaking dead-ends, which is punctuated by more news footage of the search coming to an end, despite pleas from her father not to abandon his son and the others.

Thus, so desperate for answers for her family, Sophie even proves willing to accept some irrational explanations now that all the rational ones have been exhausted. Maybe they did see a UFO that night, and maybe her brother and the others were abducted by aliens. And as crazy as that sounds, to those ends, she engineers a driveway ambush of ex-Governor Symington’s former press secretary, wanting to know why Symington lied to the people and then later admit to seeing a UFO, too; and therefore, Why did he knowingly participate in a cover-up over the Phoenix Lights? But this, too, goes nowhere.

Despite the long passage of time, and coming to grips with the fact their children are most likely dead, none of the families involved have yet to officially declare them so, meaning no funeral and no real closure. The Foster family settled on a Memorial Bench for Ashley. It’s unclear what the Abrams did as Mark’s parents refused to be interviewed, but Sophie did manage to talk to his older brother, Daniel (Biedel), who was an engineering student at Arizona State at the time of the disappearance.

As for her own parents, Sophie puts the question to them: If Josh hadn’t disappeared, would they still be together? Her father says yes, most definitely, and desperately wants to know what her mother said. Her mother was a little more philosophical. Was Josh dead? Did he suffer? Did Ashley have feelings for him, too? She hoped so, hoping he at least had the chance at a relationship however brief before, well, all of this happened.

Inevitably, all those questions got to be too much for the both of them to deal with and still be man and wife. Her father was still in denial; and will be until they find a body. As for her mother, she is ready to finally let go and move on; and with Sophie’s help, they pack up Josh’s things as a way of saying goodbye and find some semblance of peace together at long last. And with that, Sophie’s documentary seemingly comes to an end with another overwhelming montage of mixed footage as she’s dropped back off at the airport for her flight home.

Now, I say “seemingly comes to an end” because as we fade to black, we suddenly cut to three months later as we hear a voice message for Sophie from Louisa Moreno, from the high school, saying to call back as soon as she can. Cut to Sophie scrambling to get out of her rental car and sprinting to some kind of warehouse, where she meets Louisa. Apparently, this building has been in possession of the school district since the 1970s, where all the old and outdated equipment is dumped until it becomes obsolete and then thrown out completely.

And while she was clearing some stuff out, Louisa came across an old package, sent to them by a concerned citizen some time ago, who apparently found something while out hiking in the desert that belonged to the school. And what did they find? Nothing but an old beat-up video camera.

The camera is a total loss, but with Daniel Abrams help, they are able to extract and salvage the tape still inside it, whose label reads “Expedition” written in Ashley’s handwriting. Nervously, they place the tape into a working camera, hook it up to the TV, and press play. When it’s over, a shell-shocked Sophie can’t seem to get her head around what she’s just watched.

After regrouping, she hooks back up with Jay, and together, they travel out to Luke Air Force Base for a follow-up interview with a Captain Groves, with whom she had left a copy of the footage. But they get held up at the gate, where they are told by the guard to park to the side and wait. Nearly an hour later, the gate finally opens and Groves (Cansino) presents himself. Telling Jay to stay in the car but to keep filming no matter what, Sophie exits and engages with her subject. With all the extant noise it’s hard to make out what they’re saying exactly but the gist of it is the interview has been cancelled and Sophie wants to know why he won’t talk to her.

When she asks about the footage, Groves steps closer, angrily whispers something into her ear, and then leaves. Returning to the car, Jay asks a gobsmacked Sophie what the man said and is told it was a warning to not let that tape get out. Asked what she is going to do now? Sophie thinks for a beat, smiles, and says, What do you think Josh would do?

Well, we get our answer as Sophie’s documentary continues, with the last 40-minutes consisting of the unedited and unfiltered footage of the Expedition tape, which picks up right where the other tape left off with the examination of a coyote carcass. From there, Mark leads them on a hike deeper into the desert, where we see a lot of clowning for the camera, and the discovery of several petroglyphs painted on the rocks, depicting a bunch of concentric circles.

As the hike continues, it becomes obvious that Mark and Ashley are getting awfully chummy, which a jealous Josh tries to torpedo later during an impromptu game of Truth or Dare, when they stop and have a few beers, where he asks Mark the truth about an alleged other girlfriend, which turns ugly, adding credence to the argument that perhaps this was just a crime of passion after all.

When the sun starts to set, Mark says it's time to head back because he wants to reach the Jeep before it gets too dark. But as Josh drags his feet, wanting to capture the sunset on film the others quickly point to something else on the horizon: something metallic, glinting in the light, hovering in the distance, which suddenly streaks across the sky, breaks apart and disappears. Hoping to see more, the group tarries too long and are then forced to find their way back in complete darkness.

Along the way, they get lost and panic starts to set in. (Note how they all ironically claim their parents will never miss them if they don’t make it back.) As the panic escalates, Mark assures he knows exactly where they are going. When it becomes obvious he does not, Ashley demands to see the compass, determined to take over this expedition. And while she and Josh huddle up, watching the compass spin in a wobbly circle due to some kind of magnetic interference, Mark heads to some high ground to see if he can spot the vehicle.

Then, they hear something; something that sounds like the world’s most forlorn train horn, multiples of them, that’s getting louder and closer by the second. Then a multitude of strange lights appear over the hill and a great wind kicks up, sucking up all the loose dirt and gravel from the canyon floor. And when the lights and noise suddenly cease, all of that debris showers back down on top of them. The two yell for Mark, who went up the same hill, who then returns, visibly distressed, but claims he saw the car. He also refuses to answer any questions about what else he saw up there as they do find the Jeep and pile in.

Back on the highway, Mark isn’t looking so hot and quickly burns through what’s left of their water supply. Then, just as the radio stops working, Ashley spots a single light racing up fast behind them. And when it roars overhead and disappears again, the Jeep stalls out and refuses to start.

Freaked out by all of this, they push the vehicle to the side of the road, determined to hike out of there before the Lights come back. At some point, Josh notices that Mark’s nose is bleeding; and while he insists he’s okay, Mark quickly falls behind the others and can barely keep up.

And as he becomes even more feverish and sickly and disoriented, Mark starts to hear voices, and then bolts off the road and into the desert, claiming his family has arrived to rescue them. And before Josh and Ashley can catch up to him, those Lights return and Mark disappears in a flash after a huge electrical discharge lights up the desert and an even more violent wind once more sucks everything skyward.

Unable to find him, the remaining two then see a regular light in the distance, which they head toward, revealing some kind of isolated trailer house. But as they move in that direction, Ashley starts showing the same debilitating symptoms as Mark -- fever, nosebleed, weakness, and then her hair starts falling out; a sure sign of acute radiation poisoning. Then they hear that train noise again, followed by the Lights. And as they flee from all of this, Ashley raves about hearing her father as the Lights close in on them.

Here, Josh turns the camera skyward and captures what appears to be a large alien craft, consisting of several concentric, rotating metallic rings. The camera then witnesses Ashley being violently pulled into the sky, where she, too, disappears in a flash of light.

Fleeing in terror, Josh makes it to the deserted trailer and tries to hide from the pursuing alien craft. But between the massive electromagnetic discharges and gravity nullification, the trailer literally comes unhinged and explodes all around him before Josh and his camera are sucked up in another flash of light, distorting the images, until it clears up and we see the camera’s point of view as it free-falls several hundred feet back to the ground, where it lands, hard, shattering the lens, but we can still see the sun coming up over the horizon, which holds until the tape eventually runs out.

One of the biggest challenges Barber faced when trying to sell his film as a true documentary was getting his scripted actors to come off natural and genuine. To help sell it, all the people playing law enforcement were not actors but real police officers, who were given the facts of the fictional case, which allowed them to delve into their own experiences on how such a missing persons case would’ve been handled and let them wing it from there. And while that worked out well enough, it’s the true actors in the cast that really makes this thing work.

Collaboration from top to bottom was the key, and Barber encouraged a lot of improvising to make things seem more off-the-cuff. In fact, most of the non-FX scenes involving Josh, Ashley, and Mark were just the actors turned loose by themselves with a camera. And to make things even more authentic, the three leads -- Luke Spencer Roberts, Chelsea Lopez and Justin Matthews, made up their own bios and shared them with each other but embargoed certain information so only two of them would know what they were talking about while the other did not, allowing the audience to discover things along with the ignorant party -- a simple but surprisingly effective tactic.

And like her character on film, the camera immediately falls in love with Lopez, too, who is absolutely magnetic, the moment we meet her doomed character.

But while the movie is about those missing, the weight of carrying it is primarily on Florence Hartigan, who finally pieces all of this together, and the actors playing the parents, Clint Jordan, Cyd Strittmatter, Jeanine Jackson and David Carrera; because if we don’t believe they care, odds are good we won’t either. Here, Barber made the best decision of all by basically rolling the camera and getting out of the way of his group of relatively unknown players and let them work their craft.

Of course, with the way it's structured as a completed documentary, Barber can have his cake and eat it, too, when it comes to Phoenix Forgotten being a found footage movie, allowing a soundtrack, some inventive editing by Joshua Rosenfield, and a ready-made excuse for cinematographer Jay Keitel to always have the camera filming no matter what. But it also plays fair with the second half, where the lost tape is played unaltered, masking cuts when the camera whips around or when Josh stops filming, who, unlike some other films in this genre, must conserve both his battery and the finite space on the magnetic tape.

And I think that’s one of the best compliments I can give Barber and his movie: how satisfying both half of the films are on their own. I don’t think I can translate how moving the premature ending of Sophie’s doc was when she and her mother finally accept the truth that they may never know the real truth. (Having lost a sibling to violence, I may be a tad biased here.) And while this reckoning was by no means ruined with the discovery and revelation of a bona fide alien abduction as Josh’s final fate, it definitely could have if the found footage segment fell on its face or failed to achieve the same emotional punch.

To keep the film as grounded as possible, Barber and his production supervisor, Tom Moran, wanted to keep the FX practical and in-camera as much as possible. And to those ends they hired Joe Pancake and his JEM FX team, who used a combination of glorified leaf blowers to create all that wind, let gravity do the work to make it rain gravel, and used a system of counterweights to yank the actors into the sky when they got zapped. And they built a Rotisserie Rig for the ultimate climax in the trailer house, which allowed the set to spin 360-degrees to give off the illusion of gravity ceasing to exist as water runs up walls and debris angrily moves around. And to get that final shot, the filmmakers attached a camcorder to a small weather balloon, sent it skyward, and then popped it, allowing the camera to fall back to the ground. To Barber’s amazement, the inner mechanisms survived the fall and even kept recording.

This was all then complimented and fleshed-out with digital FX. Barber had hoped to realize the alien craft with a model miniature but it just wasn’t in the budget. What they pulled-off digitally from the brief glimpse we do get of that gyroscopic nightmare was really impressive and unique in design -- especially when you add in the creepy sound-effects, the wind, and detritus. It’s all very impressive and all very low-tech as one of the things not digitally dickered with was the vintage footage, which was all shot on an HD camcorder, which was then copied onto a NTSC VHS tape, which was then copied again onto another tape before it was edited into the film. And these efforts all leave a lasting impression that resonates long after the film ends.

I first became aware of Phoenix Forgotten in late 2016 when I saw a poster for it tucked away in a corner of a massive multiplex. Intrigued, when I got home, I dug out a trailer on YouTube and became even more intrigued -- impressed by some of the clout in the credits, though its cinematic influences were painfully obvious, and made a mental note to check it out whenever it hit the theater near me. Only it never did -- at least not in my neck of the woods, despite the trailer being subsequently shown several times before other partaken features, which guaranteed it was coming soon. Only it didn’t.

The film was released in April of 2017 but only managed middlin’ box-office and poor reviews and was quickly yanked from circulation. I finally came across it on some streaming service a couple years ago and finally gave it a play, where I easily bought into what Barber was selling, got caught up in the cast revealing the story, and enjoyed the hell out of it. On the surface, it doesn’t break much ground, sure, but when you start digging in and paying attention to all those little details, Phoenix Forgotten definitely deserves to be seen by more people and should be better remembered than this.

Well, if you don't know what Hubrisween is by now, Boils and Ghouls, I don't think I can help you. Anyhoo, that's 16 films down with 10 yet to go. Up next, Women are from Venus and Men are from der Ert. No. Really!

Phoenix Forgotten (2017) Cinelou Films :: Scott Free Productions :: Oddball Entertainment :: Singular / EP: Fredy Bush, Wayne Marc Godfrey, David Hopwood, Cai Jain, Robert Jones, Scott Karol, Tom Moran, Dennis L. Pelino, Michael Schaefer, Wei Cheng Yu / P: Ridley Scott, Wes Ball, Mark Canton, T.S. Nowlin, Courtney Solomon / CP: Stephanie Caleb, Pavlina Hatoupis, Samantha Thomas / AP: Iain Abrahams, Ian Brereton, Mark Frazier, Joseph Hall, Alexandra Jardine, Christine Kessler, Franchesca Lantz, Michael K. Dwyer, Babak Eftekhari, Brigitte Wise / LP: Alexandra Feld, John Taylor Feltner, Carolyn Mao / D: Justin Barber / W: T.S. Nowlin, Justin Barber / C: Jay Keitel / E: Joshua Rosenfield / M: Mondo Boys / S: Florence Hartigan, Luke Spencer Roberts, Chelsea Lopez, Justin Matthews, Clint Jordan, Cyd Strittmatter, Roberto Medinam, Jeanine Jackson, David Carrera, Ana Dela Cruz