Earth vs. the Flying Saucers 1956 Columbia Pictures
Director: Fred F. Sears
Starring: Mainly Ray Harryhausen special effects!
Scientist and newlywed Dr- Marvin and his bride Carol have a close encounter with a real flying saucer while out for a drive. Back at the lab, they again hear the mysterious noise of the saucer. Eventually, the saucer lands right there in the top secret "Project Skyhook" area. Well, the army brass can't have that! They send out the troops to shoot up the saucer.
Our robotic spacemen have an ace up their sleeve, however. Deadly ray beams to be exact! They blast the hell out of the lab, killing everyone but Dr- and Mrs- Marvin, who are trapped in the below ground lab. Along the way, the batteries in the doc's tape recorder go dead and a message comes across on the slow-mo tape. The spacemen came in peace.
Well, no more. Now the spacemen are pissed! After a couple of missed deadlines, they just start blasting every damn thing. Our scientist are forced to come up with a way to stop these invading spacemen. But how? If we could just use some flawed science to explain their saucer's function, we could bring it down!
This is a typical '50s UFO picture. It's no Day the Earth Stood Still and wouldn't be much without the Harryhausen touch. The saucers have that great merry-go-round effect, later employed beautifully in many films, most notably by Tim Burton in Mars Attacks!. The brain reading light beam is a nice touch too. I like it. XXX
Earth vs. the Spider 1958 American International Pictures
Director: Bert I. Gordon
It's the fifties and hooligan teenagers are everywhere. OK, not really in this town unless you consider Eddie Haskell to be a juvenile delinquent. Mainly, we have Mike and Carol (not Brady, that was later...). When Carol's dad doesn't return from the next town over, she gets worried, so Mike borrows his 40 year-old high school buddy's car and they go to look for him. They find a silken rope across the road and pop's truck down in the ravine.
This all leads to a cave, and a giant web and EEEK! A giant spider!! Of course, not unlike The Blob, the sheriff is skeptical (and sarcastic) until he almost shits himself when he sees the spider, which is just a tarantula superimposed on the screen. With some DDT, they "kill" the spider and for the good of science they bring it up and store it in a safe place... The high school auditorium?
You guessed it, the spider comes back alive- merely stunned by the DDT. Now the townsfolk are running down the street in a panic, just like... Well, Tarantula! Mike and Carol meanwhile have gone back to the cave, to find her bracelet which her now deceased pop had meant to give her. The spider heads back to the cave as well.
Back in town, the sheriff get news of the spider returning to its cave and the plan is hatched to dynamite the cave opening. It works! Except, oh no... Mike and Carol are trapped in the cave with the spider. Now it's like the kid in the well and it's a race against time to save them.
This really is just The Blob meets Tarantula, but it has its moments and it's not particularly terrible. The effects are as good or better than the earlier spider flick and the backdrop of Carlsbad Caverns adds some unique and affective scenery. It's as good as any giant spider movie... XXX
Ed Wood 1994 Touchstone Pictures
Director: Tim Burton
Starring: Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, Jeffrey Jones and Bill Murray
A look at the early years of Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s filmmaking adventures, beginning with the theatre. One day Ed (Depp) reads in variety that there are plans in Hollywood to make a movie about Christine Jorgensen, a famous transsexual. Being a cross-dresser, Ed immediately feels he is perfect to direct this movie for Screen Classics and eventually convinces the studio boss of it. The result, Glen or Glenda is merely the first of many god-awful films!
Along the way, Ed has befriended an aging and drug-addicted Bela Lugosi (Landau) and much of Ed's fervor for making the films seems to be to keep Bela working. For his next project, Bride of the Atom, Ed's girl Delores (Parker) convinces him he must leave the studios behind and find his own financing. After several fund-raisers and as many misfires, he completes the film and is informed by Delores that they are finished.
By now, Bela's addiction is ruining his health. He ends up in rehab, where the ever-faithful Ed meets Kathy (Arquette). They fall in love and Kathey helps Ed through his next fiasco, Plan 9 from Outer Space. For financing this one, Ed convinces some Baptists to hand over money they have raised for a series of religious films, to invest in his film- presumably to make enough to finish their series. Of course the Baptists are hovering over his shoulder throughout the making, which nearly drives Ed to the brink!
Bela dies early in filming and Ed is left with what little footage of Bela he had. The psychic Criswell (Jones), Ed's old buddy Bunny Breckinridge (Murray), swedish wrestler Tor Johnson and a very reluctant but newly out-of-work Vampira are all on board but how will they replace Bela? Easy... Ed sees Kathy's chiropractor at dinner one night and notices the similarity "in the ears". Dr. Tom is hired as Bela's replacement and merely conceals his face with a cape to "fool" the audience! Ridiculous!!
We all know what a monument Plan 9 from Outer Space became and what a legend Ed Wood became. Ed continued to hash out the schlock, eventually moving into "monster/skin flicks", until his death from drinking/smoking disease in 1978. This is a great movie about a director who made some of the worst movies ever made! Truly inspired!! XXXXX
Eegah! 1962 Fairway International Pictures
Director: Arch Hall, Sr.
Starring: Arch Hall, Jr. and Richard Kiel (of James Bond fame!)
Egad, it's Eegah! Junior plays Tom and is basically a more city-boy version of Wally Cleaver than in Wild Guitar, with a sweet gal named Roxy Miller. Her pop is an author (I think) and something of an explorer. Anyhoo, Roxy is racing along in her foreign sports car when she crashes into a caveman (Keil, in a very fake beard and the worst caveman outfit since last year's Halloween party).
He's not seriously hurt and wanders off into the desert. When Roxy tells everyone in town, no one believes her (imagine that!) yet her pop decides to take a trip out to the canyon to check things out. Tom offers him a ride in his dune buggy but hot-shot Miller gets a helicopter ride from his buddy. No sooner than he lands, he is confronted by the caveman and trips over his own gear. Comical really...
After a bad Elvis movie-like sing-along, Roxy finds her father is trapped in the desert. Tom leaps to the rescue with his dune buggy and they take off to find the old man- who didn't bring so much as water on his expedition. After another tune, they fall asleep and guess who drops by... Yeah, you guessed it, the caveman. He swoops up Roxy and takes her to his cave.
There they find her pop too and he urges Roxy not to make the caveman angry. Just do what he wants- eat his food, look at his cave drawings... Uh-oh, he wants to fuck! OK, everything but that!! Tom appears and saves the day but now the caveman is smitten (not to mention freshly shaved) and he follows them into town for even more ridiculousness!
This is like a cross between an Elvis movie and Robot Monster. It's absolutely terrible but hilarity ensues at every turn! Exactly what you'd expect from a rich kid whose father bought him a film career... XXX
The Embalmer a.k.a. Monster of Venice 1966 Walter Manley Enterprises
Director: Matteo Garrone
A sinister frogman is lurking the canals of Venice, snatching pretty young girls from the streets and to their watery graves. Through a secret underwater entrance, he takes them to the catacombs of the city into his lair. There, he changes into something more comfortable- a monk's robe and skull mask- and he embalms the girls, using his secret formula. Preserving them perfectly in his "Temple of Beauty".
The cops are dumbfounded at the disappearances, so it's a newspaper man who first gets the idea of a monster coming from the water. His boss, of course, thinks he's loony! Along the way, the newspaper man romances a teacher who is visiting Venice, with a bevy of beautiful young girls. One night, on a gondola ride, one of the young pretties disappears into the water and some local men see lights in the water.
The newspaper man decides he's going in, prompting his boss to fire him! Donning his own frogman gear, he dives where the men saw the light. At the same time, the teacher has found a secret passageway in the hotel manager's office. Down she goes with a candelabra and discovers the shocking truth and her missing student on the slab! The ex-newspaper man makes his entrance but the masked murderer is already after the teacher!
Kind of low budget and cheesy. The voiceover narration by the villain reminded me of Criswell reading Ed Wood! It's dark though and the killer's idea of preserving beauty is very good. I liked it! XXXX
Eraserhead 1978 American Film Institute
Director: David Lynch
Starring: Jack Nance
I was 18 years old when I first saw this film and I recall being very puzzled by it. I'd seen a lot of movies but I had never seen anything like this! 22 years and half a dozen viewings later, I'm still scratching my head. Of course this may have been Lynch's intention. Our hero, Henry Spencer is a printer by trade, on vacation it seems. He lives in a horribly noisy industrial area, filled with decaying factories and steam spewing pipes. Henry receives word one day, from the sultry lady next door, that his former flame Mary had stopped by and invited him to dinner. After some strange self assessment, he decides to go.
Once there, he (along with us) meets Mary's even stranger family; a domineering mother, a vegetative grandmother and Bill, her excitable retired plumber father, who has prepared a feast of game hens. "Little damn things, no bigger than my fist!" After a sickening scene at he dinner table, Mary's mother pulls Henry aside to tell him there is a child and he is the father but not before she herself momentarily forces herself on the already nervous Henry.
Back at Henry's apartment, with the new wife and "baby", things go from bad to truly fucked up in a hurry! Mary, fed up with the baby's crying runs back home to her parents', leaving Henry alone with the baby. What happens next is one of the most fantastic and surreal, not to mention disturbing, series of events ever to be set to film. To maintain any semblance of reality, we must assume Henry is dreaming the entire second half of the film. Sometimes darkly erotic, sometimes a disgusting nightmare and sometimes, as in the title sequence, just plain weird.
Often mislabeled as a horror film, this movie really defies categorization other than to say it is a David Lynch film (if you've seen any of his other films, you know what I mean!). Mel Brooks was so struck upon his first viewing of Eraserhead, that he is said to have emerged from the theatre running, waving his arms and shouting, "He's a genius!". And this was merely his first full length film... XXXXX
Exorcismo 1975 Profilmes S.A.
Director: Juan Bosch
Starring: Paul Naschy
This is the story of a girl named Lela Gibson. Her beau, Richard, comes back from Africa with a head full of ideas about occultism and leads her into some kind of satanic voodoo nonsense on the beach. On the way home, they are in a car crash and Lela is never the same. She begins having paranoid delusions, hallucinations, etc. The Gibson family suspects Richard and Lela's brother confronts him, forbidding him to see her.
After a visit from the local priest (Naschy), Lela is put under the care of a psychiatrist. The Gibsons are a wealthy family and weary of scandal. All is hush-hush! So when Lela's brother is murdered, it threatens to stir up all the old skeletons. In short order, Richard also turns up dead and as Lela descends further into madness, we suspect she may kill everyone!
But is it really Lela? The detective working the case has his doubts, as does Lela's sister and the brooding priest. But if it's not Lela then who the hell is it? And what is wrong with Lela? She is getting sores on her body and her eyes have turned to marbles. She's speaking german in a man's voice. By damn, I think she's possessed!!
This is a combination of the typical '70s devil-worship movie and a low budget The Exorcist. Shot in England, in english (for the most part) and with an english title on the print (Exorcism). I can't really explain the packaging of the DVD, except that italian films were all the rage at the time! It's pretty good... with sexy rituals and over the top "crazy" acting in Lela. On the downside, a little long and the music was terrible and distracting! XX