EEGAH! (1962)
(a.k.a. EEGAH! THE NAME WRITTEN IN BLOOD)
Article #185 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 9-17-2001
Posting date: 1-31-2002

A girl, her boyfriend, and her father encounter a tall caveman hiding out in the nearby mountain range.

By all reports, Arch Hall Jr. does an excellent job in playing the title character in THE SADIST, and I’m willing to believe that; he looks like he’d be convincing as a murderous psycho. Unfortunately, at this point in his career, his father Arch Hall, Sr. (a.k.a. William Watters) was grooming him for teen idolship, so he was supposing to be charming, loveable, and cute as a button. He also performs three songs (the icky “Vicki”, the vacuous “Valerie”, and that one about the haunted house with his swinging combo), and if you’re lucky, you’ll be rummaging through your refrigerator looking for olives when they pop up rather than trying to tear your own ears off to stop the pain. Richard Kiel plays Eegah (the name written in catsup), and rather than looking imposing and threatening, he looks gangly; this guy really needed to flesh out a bit to be effective as a monster. It isn’t helped that someone seems to have overdubbed a voice for him (saying words like “Shtemlow”) that don’t match the movement of his mouth; in fact, this movie has one of the most notorious misdubs that I’ve seen anywhere; the “Watch out for snakes” line is not only in the wrong place, but you can spot exactly where it should have gone a few moments later.

EEGAH (the name written in crayon?) is an awful film indeed, but I think it’s awful in the same surreal way as ROBOT MONSTER; it has some truly memorable images, though whether you really want to have your brain retaining these images is questionable. There is the entire shaving sequence where Eegah (the name written in shaving cream?) tries to lap up the lather with his tongue, and there is a shot of Eegah returning to his cave with a bouquet of flowers that will leave you on the floor in hysterics.

This was all supposedly based on KING KONG. Ray Dennis Steckler appears in here somewhere, as well as serving as assistant cameraman.

THE EYE CREATURES (1965)
Article #161 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 8-24-2001
Posting date: 1-7-2002

Military personnel and teens encounter aliens from outer space in Lover’s Lane.

If you’ve seen INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN, you’ve seen this one, and you’ve seen a much better version, too. This is one of several films directed by Larry Buchanan that came about as a result of AIP sending several of their old scripts to him and telling him to make cheap color versions of them for TV distribution. I originally saw them on my local Creature Feature, and if you aren’t prepared ahead of time for what’s coming, the amount of deja vu you get from watching them is incredible; you don’t necessarily recognize them as remakes immediately, but the realization that you’ve seen them before sneaks up on you. The original SAUCER MEN was a comedy, and plays like one; it’s still a comedy in the remake, but it’s so flabbily directed for the most part that it’s hard to tell. In fact, the big comic scenes in the movie are ones that didn’t appear in SAUCER MEN, and those are the scenes involving military personnel spying on kids making out at Lover’s Lane; I don’t know if these scenes were in the original scripts for SAUCER MEN, but if they were, they were left out of the finished product for a reason.

So how bad is it? Watching it again was interesting; there’ll be a moment here or there that actually doesn’t seem all that bad, and you start thinking that maybe Buchanan had some talent, but then you’ll see a hopeless muddle of scenes that show either gross incompetence or gross carelessness, and you suspect the good scene was a fluke. The costumes are ugly and incomplete, the sets dull, the day-for-night photography obvious and the acting inconsistent. One of my favorite quotes about Larry Buchanan (and I wish I could remember where I read this) stated that he probably gave AIP what it wanted when they requested these movies; he sent them exposed film. From the looks of it, he didn’t do much more than that.

One interesting experiment to try is to watch both this and SAUCER MEN in fairly close proximity; it’s a chance to see two different versions of the same script. SAUCER MEN isn’t a great movie in and of itself, but it does give you an appreciation of how simple competence and decent editing can make a world of difference.

THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN (1964)
Article #120 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 7-14-2001
Posting date: 11-27-2001

Dr. Frankenstein revives an old creation of his, but employs a hypnotist to help establish a connection with his mind. The hypnotist uses the monster to take revenge on villagers who offended him.

One of the reasons I’m engaged in this movie-watching project is to take the time to familiarize myself with some types of movies of which I don’t have a working knowledge. This is my way of saying that I really don’t know the Hammer movies all that well; my local creature feature never ran the Hammer horrors, and ouside of the Quatermass series, I’ve never really made much of an effort to see and understand them. Hopefully, as this project of mine continues, I will see many more of them and gain a sense of their strengths and their world.

From the many comments I’ve read about this movie heretofore, I gather that this isn’t the place to start. After watching it, I felt neither elation nor disappointment; it seemed like nothing more than a pleasant way to kill an hour and a half. Peter Cushing was good, as usual, but on the downside, I didn’t feel the script brought anything new to the table; it all seemed like a standard horror-by-the-numbers story. Also, the monster makeup was crummy, but I have to admit that I have yet to find a Frankenstein monster whose makeup was anywhere near as interesting as that of the original Jack Pierce creation.

ESCAPEMENT (1958)
(a.k.a. THE ELECTRONIC MONSTER)
Article #65 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 5-20-2001
Posting date: 10-3-2001

When a movie star dies in a car accident, an insurance investigator is sent out to make sure it wasn’t murder or suicide. He discovers the actor was a patient at a clinic that helped people to escape from everyday life by hooking them up to machines that cause them to have prerecorded experiences. Unfortunately, the head of the clinic is using the facility to brainwash the patients for his own ends.

There are some intriguing ideas in this SF thriller; however, the movie itself is hackneyed, incredibly talky, and quite dull. Especially disappointing are the sequences where they show the prerecorded tapes used on the patients; they all look like very poorly choreographed dance routines. A further problem is the preponderance of French accents, some of which are almost impenetrable. All in all, a lost opportunity.

EQUINOX (1970)
(a.k.a. THE BEAST)
Article #44 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 4-29-2001
Posting date: 9-11-2001

A group of students searching for a professor in a wooded area stumble across an old man who leaves them with a bizarre book. Then they begin to have run-ins with strange monsters and a sinister ranger named Asmodeus.

I remember seeing the ads for this movie on after-school television in the early seventies, and for years I wanted to catch the movie (I never got a chance to see it in theatres). It finally popped up on my local creature feature, and I was thrilled to finally get a chance to see it. I’m also glad to say that I was not disappointed; I think it has a real power to it, despite the obvious cheapness and the long shooting schedule which results in characters aging before your eyes. It has a compelling sense of Lovecraftian evil that I find fascinating. The movie features Frank Bonner, later of “WKRP in Cincinnati”, and science/fiction fantasy author Fritz Leiber as the professor.

ENEMY FROM SPACE (1957)
(a.k.a. QUATERMASS 2)
Article #43 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 4-28-2001
Posting date: 9-10-2001

Professor Quatermass (Brian Donlevy) discovers a full-scale recreation of his model for a moonbase in a remote corner of England. The same area has also been the site of strange meteor showers. When an assistant of his suffers an accident involving one of the meteors, and is then taken away by black-suited guards from the moonbase, he investigates the situation.

This is the second of the three Quatermass movies made by Hammer. Even though I have a slight preference for the other two, this is far from a disappointment; it is a top notch SF thriller, with nice performances from all involved, and a palpable sense of dread and paranoia. The Quatermass films remain to this day my personal favorite movies of those put out by Hammer, and I think a great deal of credit has to go to the creator of the whole series, Nigel Kneale.

EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956)
Article #42 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 4-27-2001
Posting date: 9-9-2001

Earth is threatened by flying saucers from outer space, but you could have guessed that from the title, couldn’t you?

This is another fifties Ray Harryhausen SF epic. The special effects and the invasion sequences in this movie are fabulous, as you might expect, but the surrounding story is even duller than usual. Still, one thing you can say about this movie; it was one of the very few fifties invasion from outer space flicks that actually delivers a full-blown invasion of the earth; I think the only other one is WAR OF THE WORLDS. The climax is definitely worth the price of admission; the full-blown saucer attack on Washington D.C. is a stunning sequence, and one of Harryhausen’s very best. Plus, the movie has Morris Ankrum, one of my favorite character actors from fifties SF films.