Month: July 2018

Destroy All Monsters (1968)

DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (1968)
aka Kaiju soshingeki
Article 2711 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 10-5-2008
Posting Date: 1-14-2009
Directed by Ishiro Honda
Featuring Akira Kubo, Jun Tazaki, Yukiko Kobayashi
Country: Japan

A mysterious force invades an island known as Monsterland, where all of the Earth’s monsters are being held for safekeeping. Soon, it becomes clear that the monsters have been taken over by aliens, and are invading the cities of the Earth.

For years, this was my Holy Grail of Japanese Giant Monster movies; I’d long known of its existence, but for some reason it never popped up on TV in my area. It was only after I had already seen most of the other Godzilla movies that I managed to find a copy of this one on home video… and was underwhelmed. For me, the big disappointment was that the movie adopted the overly familiar plot line of having space aliens take over the monsters and force them to do their bidding; I’d already seen that plotline in several of the other movies of the series, and, even though I know this one predated most of them, it was still a letdown. Watching it now, it still feels like a letdown; until the final battle, the monsters are used sparingly and in unsatisfying snippets, and most of the movie is focused on the muddled and uninteresting hunt for the hiding place of the aliens. Still, I can’t fault the movie entirely; with the final battle, the movie finally delivers on its promise, and we get a true battle royale of Earth’s monsters against the extraterrestrial monster Ghidorah. Even Minya gets a smoke ring attack before it all winds down. I do think it’s a bit of a shame that we only get the caterpillar version of Mothra, but that’s personal preference on my part. And even though I think the movie could have been a lot better, I’m still glad it’s around, and I certainly prefer it to GODZILLA: FINAL WARS.

 

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Creature of Destruction (1967)

CREATURE OF DESTRUCTION (1967)
TV-Movie
Article 2710 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 10-4-2008
Posting Date: 1-13-2009
Directed by Larry Buchanan
Featuring Les Tremayne, Pat Delaney, Aron Kincaid
Country: USA

A hypnotist takes his assistant back into a former life and predicts murders by a monster from the beginning of time.

Of the four AIP scripts that were sent to Larry Buchanan to be remade in the late sixties, I would pick THE SHE CREATURE as the weakest of the bunch; I considered the script muddled and unconvincing, and, if I liked anything about the movie, it was Paul Blaisdell’s monster suit. The other scripts had their moments, and since Buchanan’s remakes left goodly portions of the original scripts intact, there still remained a few good (if recycled) elements in his other remakes. This does not bode well for this one; I doubted that anything would be done to fix the problems with the script (and they weren’t), and I was confident that whatever monster suit was devised was going to be much less interesting than the Blaisdell suit (and such was the case). Still, I think this movie does have one improvement over the original; I like Les Tremayne a lot more in the role of the hypnotist than I liked Chester Morris, and he’s easily one of the best actors Larry Buchanan had to work with in any of these movies. Still, he’s fighting a lonely battle; the rest of the cast is third-rate, the pacing and the camerawork are both atrocious, and I think this may be the weakest of Buchanan’s AIP remakes.

 

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The Return of October (1948)

THE RETURN OF OCTOBER (1948)
Article 2709 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 10-3-2008
Posting Date: 1-12-2009
Directed by Joseph H. Lewis
Featuring Glenn Ford, Terry Moore, Albert Sharpe
Country: USA

A spunky heiress begins to believe a race horse is the reincarnation of her deceased Uncle Willie. Complications arise when a psychology professor plans to write a paper about the obsession of the heiress.

The fantastic content here is ambiguous; we never really know whether the race horse (October by name) is indeed the heiress’s late Uncle Willie (who, in his human form, is played by the great character actor James Gleason). This is appropriate, as the story itself hinges upon this fact. Still, that doesn’t mean the story is strong; it’s seems as if it’s modeled off of MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET in many ways, but the plot is so contrived and loaded with cliches that it makes things far more predictable than it should be. For the most part, the acting redeems the movie, with Glenn Ford in particular giving his character a sense of reality that helps ground things a bit. Unfortunately, our heroine is one of those combinations of aggressive cuteness combined with tomboyish spunkiness that verges more on the annoying than the irresistible, and she’s the character we spend most of our time with. The heiress subplot is extremely hackneyed and predictable, but there are clever moments here and there; my favorite has the psychologist debunking his own paper in court. The ending scene replicates what the US Postal Service did for Kris Kringle in MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET, but the situation presented is so contrived as to be unbelievable. It’s not really a bad movie, but it doesn’t quite work when all is said and done.

 

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Kismet (1955)

KISMET (1955)
Article 2708 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 10-2-2008
Posting Date: 1-11-2009
Directed by Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen
Featuring Howard Keel, Ann Blyth, Dolores Gray
Country: USA

A poet is mistaken for a great magician by the Wazir, who plans to use his abilities to keep the Caliph from marrying.

I thought the 1944 version of this movie was basically a piece of fluff with only the mildest of fantastic elements (the main character did some magic tricks). Here it is, transformed into a truly ordinary musical, even fluffier and with even less fantastic content; the main character is a poet who is mistaken for a magician, though he does no overt magic. Yes, it has “Stranger in Paradise”, but so does FIRE MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE. A few character actors brighten things up a little; Sebastian Cabot plays the Wazir, Monty Woolley is Omar, Jack Elam plays Hassan-Ben, and Mike Mazurki plays a guard; incidentally, none of these people do any of the singing. At least Dolores Gray doesn’t seem as out of place as Marlene Dietrich seemed in the earlier version.

 

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Castle of Evil (1966)

CASTLE OF EVIL (1966)
Article 2707 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 10-1-2008
Posting Date: 1-10-2009
Directed by Francis D. Lyon
Featuring Scott Brady, Virginia Mayo, David Brian
Country: USA

A group of people gather at the castle of an inventor who has made them heirs to his fortune. However, when they arrive, the inventor is dead, and it is discovered that the heirs will only get the money when they discover which one of them was responsible for the accident that burned his face. As it turns out, the inventor left behind a robot replica of himself intent on killing all of them off.

This movie has a poor reputation, but I actually was hoping that I could defend the movie a little; despite its flaws, I liked the way the script effortlessly merges the “old dark house” movies with the “mad scientist” movies, even if the mad scientist is dead at the top of the movie. I also think the script is passable and the acting is good. Unfortunately, the movie falls flat; the dull direction fails to generate the necessary suspense at the appropriate moments, and the movie ends up trudging from one tired scene to another, and the lack of energy becomes draining. An abrupt and rather disappointing ending further weakens things. In the end, I can’t really defend it too much; it just gets too dull to be much fun, though it didn’t have to be that way.

 

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Brain of Blood (1972)

BRAIN OF BLOOD (1972)
Article 2706 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 9-30-2008
Posting Date: 1-9-2009
Directed by Al Adamson
Featuring Grant Williams, Kent Taylor, John Bloom
Country: USA

The benevolent ruler of Kalid is dying of cancer, but his associates have a plan to keep him alive by sending him to the U.S. and having a doctor transplant his brain into the skull of a younger man. However, the doctor has motives of his own…

I’ll give Al Adamson one thing; it’s nice that he gave Angelo Rossitto a fairly sizable role in this one in place of the usual cameos you’d get of him. Still, much as I hate to say it, Angelo really wasn’t that great of an actor; he’s better than Tor Johnson, but a long ways from Michael Dunn. Still, Al Adamson’s usual acting troupe isn’t really much better, so he’s not in bad company here. The presence of Rossitto does make me realize that Adamson was tapping into some of the appeal of the old Lugosi Monogram movies, and this movie reminds me of some of them, especially THE CORPSE VANISHES. It starts out looking better than the usual Adamson movie, but the movie gets sillier and sillier as it goes on, and the pace becomes deadly in the second half of the movie; it makes DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN look sprightly by comparison. And speaking of that movie, this is the only other screen appearance of Zandor Vorkov, who plays a character named Mohammed. John Bloom gets to play a dimwitted giant once more, Reginal Carrol gets to show off cleavage, Vicki Volante gets terrorized… you know the routine. Still, I’d rather watch an Adamson movie than a Larry Buchanan movie.

 

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Onesime horloger (1912)

ONESIME HORLOGER (1912)
aka Simple Simon, Clock Maker
Article 2705 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 9-29-2008
Posting Date: 1-10-2009
Directed by Jean Durand
Featuring Ernest Bourbon, Raymon Aimos, Berthe Dagmar
Country: France

Unhappy to discover he has to wait twenty years for his inheritence, Onesime (aka Simple Simon) modifies a clock to make it go fast, thus causing the world to go in fast motion.

This is an amusing enough silent short, but I suspect that the amusement is somewhat blunted by the fact that fast motion has been used many times since, and also by the fact that for years, silents were projected at the wrong speed, thus causing us to get used to silents appearing to be undercranked. In fact, the outdoor scenes of cars going by looks almost normal. Still, the short has one clever moment involving one of the speediest courtships on film; you’ll see a baby grow before your very eyes. Incidentally, writer Louis Feuillade would go on to fame as a director of early French serials, including FANTOMAS, JUDEX, and LES VAMPIRES.

 

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The Sword of Ali Baba (1965)

THE SWORD OF ALI BABA (1965)
Article 2704 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 9-28-2008
Posting Date: 1-7-2009
Directed by Virgil W. Vogel
Featuring Peter Mann, Jocelyn Lane, Frank McGrath
Country: USA

When Mongols invade Bagdad, the evil Cassim betrays the Caliph to the Hulagu Khan, leader of the Mongols. However, the caliph’s son escapes and joins up with a band of thieves. They plot to defeat the Mongols.

About five minutes into this movie, I saw a scene of two young children, a boy and a girl, mixing their blood in a vow. This scene set off sirens in my head, and I popped into IMDB to check the movie connections. Sure enough, the movie took the footage from the 1944 Arabian Nights epic, ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. Then I noticed something else; this movie is in fact a remake of that one, and that scene is far from the only one that was borrowed from the earlier movie. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a good forty to fifty percent of this movie is made up of footage from the earlier movie, and it looks like this movie was made exclusively to take advantage of this footage. Characters are cast by their resemblance to the characters in the earlier movie, though the acting is much weaker here. Instead of Jon Hall and Maria Montez, we have Peter Mann and Jocelyn Lane, and instead of the unforgettable Andy Devine, we have the forgettable Peter Whitney. There are a couple of interesting touches; Frank Puglia is cast in the same role he played in the earlier movie, which certainly made it easier to pillage the footage, and it is interesting to see Gavin MacLeod playing the villainous Hulagu Khan, since I’ve never seen him in a villainous role before. Still, one has to wonder what the point is in making a scene-for-scene remake of an earlier movie in which much of the footage is from that movie; I’m certain that any reason for this movie’s existence has much to do with the fact that to many film executives, movies are considered product (as in opposition to being considered works of art). Whichever way you look at it, this seems to be one of the most unnecessary movies ever made.

 

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Beast of Blood (1971)

BEAST OF BLOOD (1971)
Article 2703 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 9-27-2008
Posting Date: 1-6-2009
Directed by Eddie Romero
Featuring John Ashley, Celeste Yarnall, Eddie Garcia
Country: Philippines/USA

Dr. Bill Foster returns to Blood Island to root out the evil of Dr. Lorca once and for all.

When I first started these Movies of the Day, I remember someone asking me if I was going to cover the Blood Island series directed by Eddie Romero and starring John Ashley, and I guaranteed I would. That was over seven years ago, and I honestly thought I would have covered at least one of them a lot earlier than this. Quite frankly, I was pretty curious about seeing them myself; I had vivid memories of seeing these movies on my local Creature Feature, and from this one, I clearly remembered the scene with the Chlorophyll monster (as he is popularly known), washing up on the beach (this was the first scene in the movie when I saw it, as the opening fight aboard the ship was cut), as well as the discovery of a worm-eaten corpse (which wasn’t near as grotesque on re-watching as I remembered it).

However, I didn’t remember the plot, and watching it again, I can see why. Despite some memorable horror moments, most of this movie is a tedious jungle adventure consisting of good guys and bad guys walking around in a jungle and shooting at each other. It is effective enough dishing out the grue, with the mad doctor keeping the monster’s head alive and separated from his body (why? It’s never explained), and some nasty operation scenes. However, this was the third film in the series (which means I’m starting at the wrong end), and I suspect the series was getting a little tired by this point; I’ve heard tell that the two previous movies are better. From what I hear, Al Adamson’s BRAIN OF BLOOD is mistakenly mentioned as part of this series.

 

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Atom Age Vampire (1960)

ATOM AGE VAMPIRE (1960)
aka Seddok, l’erede di Satana
Article 2702 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 9-25-2008
Posting Date: 1-5-2009
Directed by Anton Giulio Majano
Featuring Alberto Lupo, Susanne Loret, Sergio Fantoni
Country: Italy

A scientist believes he has found a serum that will revive dead tissue and he tries it on a disfigured woman. He falls in love with the woman, but then discovers that the effects of the serum are temporary. He can restore her looks with the glands of young women, so he takes a drug that makes him look like a monster and begins stalking and killing women.

There is something to be said for the efficiency with which this movie gets started; it manages to get the plot moving with very few lines of dialogue, and you’re quite a ways into the story in just a few minutes. However, I’m less impressed with the story itself, which is a rehash of EYES WITHOUT A FACE without the style, and the dubbed American version is confusing, badly acted, and (I suspect) cut to ribbons; there are plot points that are never explained, and much of the action seems to take place in random order. Nor is the movie helped by the fact that the putative heroine of the story is whiny, self-pitying, and consistently annoying; I found myself wondering why the mad scientist even wanted to keep her around. The flat direction is also a minus; it’s one of those rare Italian horror movies that has no sense of style. Ultimately, the most sympathetic character is the scientist’s faithful mute assistant; his scene at the end of the movie is actually a bit touching. All in all, this is one of the lesser Italian horror movies.

 

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