QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE (1935)
Article #752 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-6-2003
Posting Date: 9-3-2003
Directed by Robert Hill
Featuring Reed Howes, Mary Korman, Dickie Jones

A little girl gets lost in the jungle as the result of a tragic hide-and-seek accident, and becomes the leader of a primitive tribe. Years later, her childhood friend sets out to find her.

One of the first things you notice about this old serial is how loudly it creaks. Then you notice a curious phenomenon; some of the scenes appear to be shot at a different speed than the others. You then notice that the scenes that are in fast motion have no dialogue. It was here a quick check on IMDB confirmed my suspicions; a goodly portion of this movie is made up of footage from an old silent serial called JUNGLE GODDESS. This isn’t the only time a talkie used a goodly amount of silent footage; a horrible little movie called THE WHITE GORILLA tried it a decade later, and did a very bad job of it. This one is somewhat more successful; it actually looks like they took the trouble to cast actors and actresses that resembled the characters in the silent footage, so that only the speed of the footage really gives it away. It manages to pull off its trick for a while, but as the serial progresses, the story deteriorates; there’s at least one cliffhanger where the follow-up episode appeared to actually omit the escape footage, so I don’t know how they got out of the peril. The final episode looks largely like a bunch of cliffhangers edited together to finish up the movie. It ends up all having a bit of charm to it, but don’t expect much; it’s largely just a curio.

QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958)
Article #114 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 7-8-2001
Posting date: 11-21-2001

Whan a space station is destroyed by a mysterious ray, several astronauts in a rocket ship investigate. They are pulled onto the planet Venus where they discover a race of miniskirt-wearing, man-hungry women and their queen with a mutilated face. From then on, you’re too distracted to pay attention to the story.

Ben Hecht was responsible for the story idea. It was written by “Twilight Zone” regular Charles Beaumont. William Beaudine, Jr., the son of William “One-Shot” Beaudine, was assistant director. I mention him because I originally mistook him for his father, who is the only one of these people I’d suspect would be involved with a project like this. There have been several movies where space-farers have encountered mini-skirt wearing all female societies on other planets, and they’re all pretty dumb; this is no exception, but at least it feels as if it was intended to be a comedy. The special effects are pretty cheesy, especially the spider in the cave that always seems to appear in movies of this ilk. And then there’s Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Actually, pointing out flaws in movies like this is like shooting fish in a barrel. It’s also like trying to play the role of Hamlet in a production that also features Pamela Anderson in the role of Ophelia; you can do your damnedest, but you’ll eventually realize that no one is paying any attention to YOU. I have a word for movies like this—they’re “centipede” movies. I call them this because the second you hear the word “centipede,” all you can think about are the legs.

QUEEN OF BLOOD (1966)
Article #113 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 7-7-2001
Posting date: 11-20-2001

The earth receives a message from an alien race informing them they will be sending them an emissary. When the aliens’ craft becomes stranded on Mars, the earth sends an expedition to rescue survivors. The lone survivor turns out to be a strange mute woman who has a special diet…

Several movies were made during the sixties that were built around Russian science fiction footage; this is probably the best of them. Granted, it would have probably been best if they had just tried to do a straighforward dubbing of the Russian movie, but I’d rather that they did what they did do (build a whole new movie around the special effects footage) than to try to incorporate part of the plot of the original movie with cut-ins of American actors that never interreact with the cast of the original (the Jerry Warren approach). It has a few familiar faces in it; Basil Rathbone, John Saxon, and Dennis Hopper are all there, as well as Forrest J Ackerman as an assistant to Rathbone. I quite like Hopper in this film; I found him distracting in Curtis Harrington’s earlier NIGHT TIDE, but here he adds some very nice human touches to his character. And Florence Marly, who plays the alien queen, really does leave you with that creepy feeling that despite her human form, she is totally alien on the inside.

Overall, I quite like the movie. I think it’s one of those that may have had an influence on ALIEN. I also find the ending quite intriguing in its way, despite the fact that it is an example of what I think of as the “typical seventies downbeat ending” only in a movie from the sixties. Nonetheless, I really wonder what is going to happen next, and this is one movie to which I would have liked to see a sequel.