Zontar, the Thing from Venus

1966 remake

Rating: 3/20

Plot: Dr. Taylor befriends what he believes is a friendly alien from Venus and helps him figure out a way to come to earth to solve all of our problems and make us as technologically advanced and wonderful as his planet. But Zontar turns out to be a mean "thing" and actually has other plans, plans involving mind control and mayhem! Arrgh! Zontar!

So somebody at Azealea Pictures decided that it would be a good idea to remake a Roger Corman B-science fiction flick (It Conquered the World) with a worse director. See that poster there with the menacing "thing" that looks like it could be straight from the sketchbook of a possibly schizophrenic child? That's actually a fairly accurate visual. The "thing" doesn't look much better than that. I swear, by the way, that I've seen that exact screaming woman in the exact same pose on a poster for another movie. This is just as bad (just as good if your glass is half full) as Larry Buchanan's other movies (see Attack of the the Eye Creatures [sic] or It's Alive [the proud Manos Award winner for my blog two years ago]) which means it's fun enough to watch at least seven times and has this mystical quality that almost makes it worth basing a religion on. This is stuffed with some juicy dialogue, philosophically insightful stuff about good and evil. There's a lengthy quote at the end about how man needs to find the answers within as opposed to without and about how "war, misery, and strife have always been with us and we shall always strive to overcome them." I'm not 100% sure, but I think it was plagiarized from The Diary of Anne Frank. Oh, and the reason the thing is called Zontar? That explanation is priceless. There's also some really unfortunate attempts at comedy, mostly courtesy of a pair of soldiers. One of them says "I saw a funny-lookin' boid" about six times (because it's funny?) and once, my response (an "Ehhh" like I'd been punched hypogastrically) was the exact same as one of the characters. Zontar, as I mentioned, looks ridiculous, like a greasy owlish swamp thing with pterodactyl wings. When Larry Buchanan makes that thing fly though? That, ladies and gentlemen, is movie magic. Well, assuming seeing funny-lookin' boids is magical. My favorite scene: panic in the streets; a woman stops a policeman to ask a question about manually operating an iron lung. What the hell? The fact that she yells "Stop!" while standing face to face with the policeman adds another level of greatness.

I have to go. I have more Larry Buchanan movies to watch. God bless America!

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?

1964 "monster musical"

Rating: 3/20 (Dylan: 2/20)

Plot: Jerry takes his girlfriend and his buddy to an amusement park so that they can run around like teenagers in the 1950s used to. While there, Jerry is seduced by a stripper and hypnotized by a murderous prognosticator which I guess makes him a Mixed-Up Zombie. Or an Incredibly Strange Creature. Whatever he turns into, it understandably messes up his love life.

According to the poster, this is starring an actor named Cash Flagg, but don't be fooled. Cash Flagg is Ray Dennis Steckler, a guy who apparently wanted to prove with one movie that he could neither act or direct. It's famously bad, known for its ridiculously long title (although Roger Corman's 1957 The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent beats it) and for being cinema's first "monster musical," a genre that in hindsight is likely unncecessary. About half of the movie consists of these excruciating song and dance numbers. They were bizarre and badly performed and succeeded only in making me feel like a Mixed-Up Zombie who wanted to stop living. The poster also advertises that it was filmed in Terrorama which must be a euphemism for "We only had a budget of a hundred bucks." Actually, I found through my research (that's right; I research) that the budget for this was 38,000, money apparently used unwisely. Steckler also used a nifty trick he called Hallucinogenic Hypnovision which involved people in masks running around the theater scaring the audience. Another interesting bit of trivia: the producers of Dr. Strangelove were annoyed at the original title of this film (The Incredibly Strange Creature: Or, Why I Stopped Living and Became a Mixed-Up Zombie) and threatened lawsuit. Anywho, the movie, one that might inspire a person to use words like anywho. It's got an unscripted quality, probably because Steckler was the type of director who didn't use scripts. Scripts? Who needs 'em!? Steckler also apparently utilizes a special filming technique called Nausea Cam, most naturally during scenes on a roller coaster and almost naturally during some of the dancing scenes but not naturally at all when the actors are just standing there having a conversation. The actors look nauseated themselves a lot of the time. My favorite character in this mess is Ortega, the fortune teller's assistant. I think he might be one of the titular strange creatures. He might have been just a clown or a hobo though. My favorite performance, however, was Atlas King (another pseudonym?) as Jerry's friend Harold. Atlas is only in one other film, another Steckler masterpiece released the same year. I'm sure bad sound contributed, but I couldn't understand a word the guy said, something that surprisingly didn't really make the movie any more difficult to understand. And the bad sound didn't make the other actors unintelligible. Dylan watched this with me as a punishment and took his own notes. He gave me his notes, so if you don't believe me that this film is a must-see, maybe you'll trust him: muffled/undiscernable voices, dark and blurry and hard to see, really bad music, really bad dancing, camera angles--what's with that under-the-car shot?, disembodied voices, day/night continuity errors, random and irrelevent shots, long boring songs that don't advance the plot, no incredibly strange creatures in the movie. See? It's exactly what lovers of bad cinema look for in a movie!

Note: Ray Dennis Steckler directed Rat Pfink A Boo Boo, a movie that I have been wanting to see for twenty-two years.

You can watch this on Hulu or, with the Mystery Science Theater robots, on Netflix.

The Eye Creatures

1965 Larry Buchanan sci-fi remake

Rating: 3/20

Plot: Titular eye creatures (see below) invade earth and interrupt necking teens. One of the teens, a thirty-year-old one named Stan, hits one of them with his car because he's driving without his headlights on. He and his girlfriend try desperately to get the police to believe their story, but he's arrested for hitting a drifter instead. They return to the scene of the accident to look for evidence of aliens. Or maybe just to make out again.

Larry Buchanan, director of the Manos Award winning It's Alive, sure knew how to make bad movies. The silliest thing about this Z-movie is the whole night/day continuity error thing. The story takes place during a single night; however, half the scenes are being filmed in obvious daylight. It almost seems like every other scene switches from day to night or back again, and if I didn't know better, I'd think they did it on purpose to be funny. Or maybe the silliest thing about this is the acting. Lots of Torgo contenders here. The guy who plays "Jim" is really great, especially that moment when he spots a wildly spinning UFB (unidentified flying hubcap) and spitting out, "This one was green!" with far too much excitement. The old man who, although he only gets one line (essentially "Get off my lawn, kids!"), gets to say it over a thousand times. The pair of Peeping Tom surveillance dudes were also impressive. I can't find any of these thespians names because the cast list doesn't show that the characters even have names. But I know that guy's name was Jim! The scene where Stan hits one of the aliens with his car should be used as a "how not to" in an editing course in film school. The girl screams, Stan looks over at her, there's a screech, the girl says, "Oh no!" or something, and then there's a thud, all with this comical choppiness. The alien monsters themselves, eye creatures apparently, were obviously dudes in hastily-assembled costumes. Here's what they look like:


Not quite as embarrassing as the monster in It's Alive, of course, but still pretty dopey. Watching one of their severed rubber arms prowl around was about as embarrassing though.

Here's my favorite tidbit about this movie though:

Apparently, this was shown on television and the producers wanted to jazz up the title a bit by adding "attack" in the title. I guess it makes it seem more menacing. Problem is, as you can see above, they didn't bother proofreading their work and ended up with Attack of the the Eye Creatures as the title. That is awesome. And so is Larry Buchanan who, as I examine more of his work, might have a body of work that is more inept than even the great Ed Wood.

Santa Claus

1959 Mexican Santa Claus movie

Rating: 3/20 (Jen: 1/20 [fell asleep]; Emma: 2/20 [fell asleep]; Abbey: 10/20)

Plot: Pretty much your standard Christmas story. It's Christmas Eve and Santa Claus is somewhere in space or heaven overseeing his sweatshop while children from many different cultures help him prepare for his magical flight. Of course, Satan wants to stop him and sends demon Pitch to tempt kids to be naughty and kill Santa. And of course, Santa has to get help from Merlin the magician to survive the night and ensure that the nice children wake up with a living room full of presents. Even the poor little girl who just wants a freakin' doll!

You have to love a Christmas movie that has the ability to punish viewers who fall asleep while watching it with hellish nightmares of holiday demons and laughing reindeer robots. This is bizarre from the get-go. It starts with a seemingly endless scene with Santa playing an organ while showcasing the variety of countries that the jolly old elf has apparently kidnapped children from to work in his sweatshop. For a moment, I thought I was watching a live-action film based on Disney's "It's a Small World," something I'm sure is on the horizon. Each group of children got to sing a little song that sounded like it could have come from the country they represent, and my favorite was when the American children did "Mary Had a Little Lamb." Seriously? That's the song that best represents America? It's not even a Christmas song! The next scene takes the viewer naturally to hell where the "King of Hades" lights a firecracker and leads a poorly-choreographed dance. Then it's back to Santa where we get a chance to see just how he knows if you've been sleeping or if you've been awake or if you've been bad or good. Apparently, he's got a big machine with giant lips, a telescope with an eyeball, and a satellite thing with a human ear attached. The surreal props and goofy sets show some creativity, but it also makes it obvious that the people who made this thing only had a rudimentary understanding of Santa Claus. I mean, there aren't even elves and his four reindeer are clunky robots. Speaking of those robots, at one point one of them laughs (he he he ha he ha ha ha ho he) and it might be the scariest thing I've heard in my entire life. Santa's almost nonstop maniacal laughter (nonstop except when the devil is trying to murder him) isn't much better though. There's just so much about this movie that is so awkward, and a lot about this movie that is downright unsettling. A pair of dream sequences--one with giant dancing dolls and one with a kid who opens up coffin-like presents containing his parents--are just weird, and almost every scene with Pitch gave me the chills. Of course, Pitch was a poorly-costumed red-painted demon, so I guess that was the desired effect. One of the scariest moments was when the little poor girl was having a repetitive conversation with the devil about stealing a doll. She must have said "No, I don't want to do evil" five or six times. The good characters, absent-minded Merlin and a magic-key-making blacksmith, are fun. Merlin's got this weird bouncing gait that makes Torgo's walk look normal, and the blacksmith has some hair glued to his chest to, I guess, make him look more blacksmithy. Nobody's going to mistake this for a Miracle on 34th Street or an It's a Wonderful Life, but this just might be my new favorite Christmas movie. Like those movies, you get to learn beautiful lessons like how "a dream is a wish that the heart makes" or how people on earth eat "even smoke and alcohol." Fun for the whole family unless some of your family members would rather not have Satan anywhere near their Christmas entertainment.

The Wild Women of Wongo

1958 Girls Gone Wild precursor

Rating: 3/20

Plot: On an island named Wongo, you've got two tribes of folk--one with ugly men and beautiful women and the other with handsome men and ugly women--and some ape men. They're oblivious to the fact that other people are on the island until one of the handsome men arrives via raft to get help following an ape man attack. They're not very nice to him. Then a bunch of other stuff happens, very little that I actually understood.

The most surprising thing about the alliterative The Wild Women of Wongo is that somebody was credited as a "dialogue coach." I'm not sure exactly what a dialogue coach does, but it apparently doesn't have anything to do with making the dialogue more realistic or performed in a natural way. This isn't worth watching despite some amusing moments. Scenes are often punctuated with a smart-alecky parrot who says things like, "Uh oh! Here we go!" It almost made me feel like I was watching the movie with a little feathered buddy. I also liked how the movie began with a prelude narrated by Mother Nature. There's a wacky catfight with this weird canned cheering, some great special effects with crocodiles making a meal of some ape men (all who have identical screams), and a great scene with one of the wild women wrestling with what looked to be a dead crocodile. You also get an extended scene with the wild women dancing right after the woman at the temple turns into an alligator woman. Yes, that's as corny as it sounds. There's a great (SPOILER ALERT!) happy ending that involves more winking men than I figured I'd ever see in one movie. I sincerely hope that'll be a record that is never topped. I know I may have made this movie sound like a fantastic way to spend an evening, but don't be tempted. This really isn't worth your time no matter how much you enjoy wild women.