Teen Wolf

1985 werewolf comedy

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Scott Howard has no identity. He's a mediocre basketball player on a terrible high school team. The object of his affection doesn't know he exists. He's even got a really boring name! That all changes when he turns into a werewolf, the transformation suddenly giving him this dynamic personality and superhuman abilities. Becoming a wolf, however, has its price, and the price for Scott Howard is his true self.

Here's the deal. Since 1985, I've had recurring nightmares where I die after an accident while surfing on my friend's van. The dream is generally the same with slight variations. I'm surfing, and my friend starts turning into a wolf, gets really freaked out by the sight of his wolf fingernails, and swerves wildly. I spill off, the Beach Boys music stops, and a steamroller rolls over me. My last words are almost always, "Learn to fucking drive, Alex P. Keaton!" For the past 25 years or so, I've been convinced that I will die while surfing on a van and have done my best to avoid the activity.

Recently, as most of my readers know, I've been working at the dumpiest motel on the face of the earth, an establishment crawling with drug dealers, prostitutes, and drifters. Lately, it seems that it's unlikely that I'll die while surfing on a van and will probably die while working a night shift at this motel.

So in retrospect, it was probably a terrible idea to watch Teen Wolf while working a night shift at the motel. I'm not supposed to sit on the couch in the lobby and watch television anyway. Well, I don't think I am. It's never been addressed officially, but it seems like a really strange thing for my manager to pay me to do. If he knew, I can imagine having a conversation with him that had the words "Do you think I pay you to sit around and watch Teen Wolf?" which would probably make me start laughing which would make him ask "What? Do you think this is funny?" which would make me say (of course!) "I am an animal! Woooo!"

The perfect end to that story would be for my manager and I to take advantage of the sweet van the motel uses to shuttle people to the airport (illegally, it seems, since we're told to take off the sign on the door that advertises the inn because "we're not allowed there") to ride the waves. It's the perfect vehicle for van surfing! We would go out on the highway and pull over on the shoulder. My boss, a little Indian fellow, would start to get out, but I'd stop him, look him in the eye, and say, "These waves are mine." And then I'd probably die.

But I digress. My manager isn't Stiles, and I doubt he'd ever take me van surfing. Watching the most dangerous movie of all time in the most dangerous motel of all time? I defied the odds by surviving the experience. It's like I stared Death in his scary skull eyes and chuckled. And I got paid like 15 dollars to watch Teen Wolf on a couch that smells like somebody urinated on it. That, my friends, is a win-win situation.

"I'm not a fag. I'm a werewolf." I think that line was in Universal's Wolf Man, wasn't it?

Cory's Birthday Movie Celebration: Godzilla vs. Mothra

1964 monster movie

Rating: 13/20 (Dylan: 2/20)

Plot: A big storm washes a giant multi-colored egg ashore. A greedy land developer purchases said egg and attempts to exploit it for profit. Creepy miniature twins come from an island to retrieve the egg which they tell everybody a hundred times is really important to the people of the island. The greedy guy refuses and ends up waking up Godzilla from his hibernation. He goes on his typical destructive rampage, and Tokyo has to depend on a giant moth and the contents of the egg to save them from making all the buildings fall down. Spoiler: Silly string or caterpillar ejaculate saves the day!

A warning from the Japanese against being greedy. Or a warning about nuclear weapons. Or maybe it's a warning about being greedy with nuclear weapons. At any rate, once you get to the part where you see what nuclear testing did to that island with that lame giant turtle puppet and the red people, you'll be convinced to get rid of your nuclear weapons immediately. This seems to be an especially colorful and weird entry in the Godzilla canon, and it left me with some questions. First, why dub in broken English? "Look out there! It's gigantic monster egg!" It makes all the dialogue ridiculous which, I'lll admit, is actually part of the fun. Second, why can Godzilla knock down giant concrete buildings with one or two paw swipes while he can barely do any damage at all to a greenhouse or an egg? Finally, where did the Japanese military get so many giant nets? I liked that, by the way--Plan A: Electrocute Godzilla; Plan B: Throw giant nets on Godzilla and then try to electrocute him. I like those creepy singing twins, by the way. With their first appearance, some characters hear their voices speaking in unison and decide that they're spies. What? Spies? They'd have to be like the loudest spies ever, wouldn't they? I also liked Godzilla's first appearance in this--undulating ground and a phallic tail thirty-two minutes into the movie. You also get a Japanese guy sporting a Hitler stache. But the quality of these Godzilla movies is probably based on the scenes of monster wrastlin' and architectural destruction. The big battle (not to be confused with the final battle) is a whole lot of weird close-ups and jittery camera work. Mothra perhaps isn't the most formidable foe for Godzilla. He's too fuzzy, and flapping-hard and expelling chalk dust didn't do much for me. Dig the close-up of Godzilla's pissed face when he first spots Mothra flying toward him though. The actual final battle is all perverse caterpillar flailing and attacks with silly string. Mothra was kicking Godzilla's ass for most of that first big fight but couldn't finish him off. And then he's done in by silly string? Dylan liked the music in this enough to give it a 2/20. The song that played during the giant net drop sounded really familiar to me.

Rubber

2010 killer tire movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: An abandoned automobile tire rolls around the desert and uses its telepathic powers to destroy any trash, bunnies, or people who get in its way. A crowd of people is given binoculars to watch the proceedings.

Like Christine or Maximum Overdrive or Duel but with only a tire. Or like your typical 50's monster movie except instead of a guy in a rubber suit causing mayhem, you just get the rubber. From a technical standpoint, I enjoyed trying to figure out how the tire was brought to life. It may be a much easier special effect than I think it is, and it certainly wasn't a special effect you'd describe as flashy. Most of this movie is the tire rolling around, only stopping to quiver and make a loud noise and make something explode, or people sitting around watching the tire, a meta-cular cinematic joke that's the sort of thing Soderbergh might put together in his spare time between Oceans 19 and Oceans 20. We're told at the beginning that this film is an "homage to the most powerful element of style" in movies--a lack of reason. It frequently falls into annoying cutesy-clever territories, turning into the kind of indie production that you want to take out back and slap around a bit. But was I entertained? Heck, yeah! It's a tire rolling around making bunnies explode! How could I not be entertained? Funniest bit involves a cop taking a tire off a car and saying, "This is what our killer looks like." No, the funniest bit is probably where they set a trap with an explosive dummy. I also can appreciate any movie that has a scene implying that a tire has jerked off while watching an exercise video. I'll give director Quentin Dupieux credit for seeing this ridiculous idea to its end, but his message about movies comes across like a film school student trying to impress his professor who rambles on and on about arthouse cinema every class.

I'll probably lose any chance at a Father of the Year Award for admitting this, but I was watching this with a couple of my children until the moment when heads started exploding and I told them to go upstairs. They didn't enjoy the bunny explosions at all and were probably disappointed that their father laughed at it.

Gooby

2009 children's horror film/possible sequel to The Shining

Rating: 5/20 (Emma: 2/20; Abbey: 1/20)

Plot: Poor little Willy's got no friends, his parents don't really pay attention to him, and to make his life even more miserable, his family is moving to a new place. And he's seeing monsters. Luckily, his childhood stuffed toy comes to life and septuples in size to hang out with him.

Biggest laugh I've had in a while: When looking up information for this movie, I saw it described on several websites as being about a boy and the bear from The Shining. And Gooby does like like the man in a bear suit in my favorite scene in The Shining which might make this the greatest movie of all time. Then again, it might represent the main problem with Gooby as a children's movie--that it's terrifying. Unless you happen to think that the main problem is that the name of the movie is Gooby. It's one of those titles I can't imagine people wanting to ask about for at a ticket window. "Two tickets to, umm, Gooby please?" I thought for sure there'd be a twist ending where it's revealed that Willy is schizophrenic. I assumed this was like an after-school special about mental illness. It's really the only way this could have made any sense at all. I figured the whole time that he would be the only person to ever see Gooby, but it didn't turn out to be that way at all. Toward the beginning of the story, he does see a CGI monster thing, the reason Gooby shows up in the first place, I think. But the man-in-a-suit Gooby and th CGI monster never interact, so I'm not real sure why that CGI monster was in this thing at all. Maybe they intended to have Gooby do battle with the CGI monster but realized that a CGI monster and a guy in a suit would look ridiculous. I couldn't believe it when I saw that this movie came out in 2009, probably because it's got the sentimentality of an 80's kiddie flick and everything it rips off comes from that era. The story's dopey, the dialogue is embarrassingly awful, and the way this plot develops would make even the men with the most cinematic intestinal fortitude lose their cookies. Gooby, by the way, eats a lot of cookies in this, sort of like E.T. with the Reese's Pieces minus the distasteful product placement. That would put Gooby a notch above E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, but at least there's not a scene in the latter where E.T. farts and then starts fanning his crotch to waft the smell in Elliot's direction. Gooby does that because that's the type of friend Gooby is. And that's the type of movie Gooby is.

And for your amusement, here's a picture of the bear from The Shining (best scene in that movie, by the way) and a picture of Gooby from Gooby (there is no best scene in that movie, by the way):

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.

Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare

1968 Japanese monster movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A vampirish demonoid is awakened from the dead and begins biting people on the neck, taking over their bodies, and denounce Buddha. Frog Man doesn't like it much and hops off to find his fellow monsters including Jabba, TV-Belly Man, Two-Faced Woman, Potato Man, Neck Girl, and Fat Yoda. They investigate and see about expelling the rubber man from the premises.

Well, my favorite monster didn't even make the poster. When I first saw him, I thought, "Hmm. That looks like an umbrella with an absurdly long tongue." Then another character called it an "umbrella monster" and I peed myself and had what can only be described as a religious experience. It's goofy stuff, perhaps even goofy by Japanese standards, but it's shot pretty well, contains an adequate amount of cool atmospheric settings, and does well at creating this weird mystical world. Maybe I wished it didn't have the comic overtones or wasn't so much for children, but this is quickly paced enough and so stuffed with goofy rubber monsters that I can forgive it. The snake-necked woman effects were fun, and I've already mentioned my favorite monster (the umbrella monster). But this isn't about individual monsters. This is about filling the entire screen with goofy monsters and pretending it's perfectly normal. The bad guy could be a little more engaging. I liked how the producers didn't seem to think biting people and stealing their identities didn't seem evil enough and decided to have him say "You suck, Buddha!" to make him the epitome of maleficence. Fun movie, and I'm thrilled that there are two more Yokai Monsters movies out there for me.

Nightbeast

1982 sci-fi horror movie

Rating: 4/20

Plot: An alien crashes in the woods, and some guys camping hear it. They investigate and are immediately lazered into oblivion. Who is going to stop the Nightbeast, a being impervious to bullets and seemingly unstoppable? Oh, and there's a Bad Fonzi character running around raping people. Somebody's also got to stop him.

Director Don Dohler directed The Alien Factor in 1978, but he apparently wasn't happy with it and thought he could do better. So just four years later, he remade the story as Nightbeast. If this movie actually is better, I wonder how bad The Alien Factor is. The first half of the movie is jam-packed with repetitive action scenes involving the monster shooting people and them disappearing with some graphics that look like something I could have seen while playing Atari as a kid. The spaceship scenes at the beginning were cheaply artistic. I was all ready to give the guy who played Uncle Dave the Torgo award for the year until I noticed that every single performer in this movie is almost as bad. I'm not sure I've seen a worst ensemble cast. Don Leifert played Bad Fonzi (actually, Drago) with a low-budget intensity that gave me chills, and I'm guessing, since a quick glance at his short resume shows that he only acts in movies from this same director, that he was either a good buddy of Don Dohler or they were both in some club for people named Don. And who do we get to be the big action hero who will eventually save the day? This guy:

That guy! He, by the way, only acted in one other movie--The Alien Factor. But Tom Griffith sure nailed this one, rocking that salt and pepper afro and shooting an insane amount of bullets at the monster during several scenes despite knowing that it has no effect. And to top it all off, he gets himself a sex scene! That's right. You get to see that guy's ass. If I made a top-ten list of awkward sex scenes, this would be in there somewhere. I have to give credit to Dohler for his ability to shock though. Along with that shocking sex scene, there are some pretty gruesome deaths. Well, after the thirty minutes of lazerin'. Intestines make a cameo appearance, and there's a nifty decapitation. Hell hath no fury like a rubber-faced alien scorned, I guess. If you like bad movies, this isn't a bad way to spend eighty minutes. Or three hundred and eighty minutes if you have to rewind and rewatch that sex scene a bunch of times like I did.

The Host

2006 Korean monster movie

Rating: 9/20

Plot: Stupid Americans! Their army dumps formaldehyde (I think that's what they said) into the river and for reasons that don't make scientific sense, a reptilian, many-tentacled monster is born. It starts killing and dragging people off, including Park Hyun-Seo. The rest of the Park family have to find her.

This is a lot of frenetic, head-scratchin' action sequences with a herky-jerky CGI tentacle-flailing monster juxtaposed with calm scenes of dopey characters sharing moments that I assume are supposed to be poignant or humorous. It was hard to tell because the dubbing didn't match the subtitles, and neither made much sense to me. This isn't like those horror/monster movies where the makers don't let you see the monster or only reveal the monster a little bit at a time. No, you get to see the thing pretty early on, and I thought it looked pretty silly. Alternating between phallic and vaginal, this thing could be a Freudian's nightmare, but if you've got no interest in psychoanalyzing the special effects team, I don't think it would be of much interest to anybody. Maybe I should give this movie credit for trying to do something a little different with the monster movie genre, but it's got this ultra-modern flavor (read: it sounds and looks really loud) that I find annoying. The Host focuses on a family of four rather than society in general as with a Godzilla movie, and that doesn't help matters either since I didn't care for the Park family. The ending was especially yucky.

One Million Years B.C.

1966 caveman movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Tumak can't find any friends, probably because he acts like a caveman, spending all his time grunting and fighting over food. He's thrown out of his tribe of cavemen (the rock people) and finds refuge with another group of cavemen (the cave people) who happen to include a scantily-clad Raquel Welch. The cave people end up not liking him very much either and boot him out of their home. Tumak's forced to buy a book--How to Win Friends and Influence Cavemen--and try to survive with Raquel Welch as giant turtles try to devour them.

I don't want to sound like a pervert or anything, but Harryhausen's dinosaurs are really sexy in this thing. After some embarrassing stock footage of volcano spewing, the effects do pick up with big lizards and big spiders and some stop-motion turtle action. The dinosaurs are really well done, and I was especially impressed with the human-creature interaction. Smooth. These may be Harryhausen's most realistic dinosaurs, and as always, it's fun to watch him play with his toys. The real stars of the show are probably Raquel Welch's parts though. There's one scene where she's stabbing at a fish right before Tumak falls into a lake. I'm not an expert on psychology or anything, but I'm pretty sure I know what Freud would have say about that. In a way, it reminds me of every single dream I had as a middle schooler. As a movie, this is a lot more boring than good. It's an hour and a half of dirty fur-dressed people grunting in a desert, and if I wanted to see that, I would have gone to my family reunion.

Santo and Blue Demon against the Monsters

1970 masterpiece

Rating: 20/20 (Kairow: 20/20)

Plot/Review: See guest reviewer Kairow's thoughts here: Kairow's Blog


I don't have much to add to what he had to say. The other Santo movies I've seen have had him up against one or two monsters. This one has a ridiculous amount of monsters, making it even wackier than the others. Which likely makes this the wackiest movie I've ever seen. Any Santo movie gets an automatic 20/20. See "Santo Rule" described in the entry for Santo vs. Frankenstein's Daughter).

Other Santo movies on the blog:

Santo in the Vengeance of the Mummy
Santo vs. the Vampire Women

King Kong Escapes

1967 King Kong movie

Rating: 7/20

Plot: Some people with their own submarine venture to Kong Island for reasons that I can't remember, and discover that the King himself is alive and kicking. And beating his chest. Naturally, he falls in love with the only female on the submarine. Meanwhile, a guy who you know has to be evil because he's got a cape builds a King Kong robot because he wants to extract something precious from the depths of the earth. When that doesn't work, he decides to kongnap the titular hero and use him.

This is quite the ridiculous slab of Japanese funk, but I'd much rather watch this movie than either the 1976 King Kong or the Peter Jackson remake. It's worth the price of admission (free if you shove it down the front of your pants and run out of the store like I did) for the shots used to show that Kong is enamored by the girl. He wiggles, rolls his eyes, and quite frankly, looks like he's masturbating. Which begs the question--is there a movie that features King Kong jism? Is there a movie called King Kong Jism? What about a (probably pornographic) movie called King Dong? What about a band called King Kong Jism? This movie's got a little something for everybody with the exception of bodies looking for the aforementioned jism. Hey, there's another great band name--Aforementioned Jism. You get some wonderful dubbing. And by wonderful, I mean absolutely horrible. A lot of the characters sound a little like John Wayne. You get some rikongilous fight scenes with guys in goofy suits, including a T-Rex thing that does this goofy drop-kick thing. And that King Kong robot? Hell, yeah! You get some terrific dialogue. "Don't sink the ship" and the poetic "He's an oriental skeleton, a devil with eyes like a gutter rat" spoken about the bad guy whose name just happens to be Doctor Who. You get plenty of irritating sound effects if you're in to that sort of thing, and a whole bunch of shots meant to show perspective, shots designed to prove that we're not just looking at toys in a bathtub but that somehow make things worse. It's all pretty stupid, but at least it's never dull.

I just looked it up. There is a porno parody called King Dong. There's also a Chinese restaurant called King Dong. And a variety of other websites. There isn't a movie called King Kong Jism though.

Jimmy Tupper Vs. the Goatman of Bowie

2010 horror comedy

Rating: 14/20 (Kairow: 10/20)

Plot: Jimmy Tupper is a complete loser. He's a Starbucks employee by day and nothing more than an alcoholic joke to his friends by night. And nothing about him indicates that his future will be drastically different. One night, his friends decide to dump Jimmy, who has passed out once again, in the middle of the woods and leave him. When he doesn't show up for work the next day, his friends go looking for him. They find him, beaten and bloodied and raving about having to fight off a goatman attempting to drag him away. When his friends don't believe him, he decides to camp out in the woods with a camera in order to capture footage of the Goatman of Bowie.

Warning: Spoilers! I generally try to avoid including spoilers, but I can't help including him while writing about this one.

Sometimes when I watch a movie, I can't help thinking of the rating I'm going to give it. Here's my thought progression as I watched Jimmy Tupper Vs. The Goatman of Bowie with my good friend, Kairow.

OK, I knew this was one of these Paranormal Activity/Blair Witch/Cloverfield found footage deals going in, but this party scene at the beginning is absolutely brutal. This is looking like a 3/20.

I like this Jimmy Tupper fellow. His friends sure are mean though. But at least it's sort of funny. This might be a 6/20.

What's this graduation footage doing in here? Who are these people talking about a Barbie doll collection? Back to a 2/20.

I'm penalizing this a point for making me dizzy.

Oh, my God. Nothing is happening here. I hope Kairow will speak to me again after this. I'm sure glad my wife didn't come to see this. Is this even a movie? 2/20 still.

This is almost like one of those jokes that was almost funny but then isn't funny at all but just keeps going and going, the Brett Favre of jokes, and eventually becomes funny again just because of its endurance. I'm bumping this up to a 7/20.

Marshmallows and bacon! 9/20.

Uh oh. I'm not sure this movie's going to have a goatman in it. I paid to see a freakin' goatman! If I don't see a goatman by the time this ends, I'm taking the life of everybody in this theater. 7/20.

My God! Look at that goatman! 15/20!

The ending! Goat men? Absolutely bad ass! 36/20!

I really enjoyed this movie. The found footage stuff makes the first sixty minutes seem almost endless. It builds anticipation if it doesn't quite build enough tension or suspense. Now, I think I have a lot more tolerance for this sort of thing than most people. I appreciated Tupper's meanderings, and I like how his character gradually deepens as he blathers on about making comic books or how he hates his friends. And his explanations of his plans to lure the goatman to his camp are hilarious. In a way, he reminds me of The Grizzly Man's Timothy Treadwell as his most pitiful. I was completely fooled into thinking this would end one way, then fooled into changing my mind about how it would end, and finally being way off with either of my guesses. At first, I figured this was going to add up to nothing at all, that there would be no goat man, that this was an almost Theater of the Absurd type of found footage parody, a mash-up of Blair Witch and Waiting for Godot. Even though I know how the movie ends now, that's still probably not too far off. The found footage stuff is realistic. There's nothing in this that feels contrived, but that might make this less entertaining for less patient viewers. A violently quivering camera, even during scenes that aren't supposed to be the least bit suspenseful, also adds to the realism, but again, this might make Tupper tedious for a lot of the audience. Most real of all, is the performance of lead actor Andrew Bowser, the same guy who directed this unless there are two people named Andrew Bowser working on the same project. He's a very believable loser, and I really felt I was experiencing all of this with an authentic person instead of just a character in a horror movie. One question, however--quite abruptly, this changes from a found footage thing to a more traditional horror movie at the end. Kairow liked it more at that point, but I thought the juxtaposition was strange, and I'm not sure I understand why it changed abruptly. Still, that last fifteen minutes is pretty rad.

I saw this at the Indianapolis Museum of Art as part of the Indy Film Festival. It was the only movie in the festival with the word "man" in the title.

The Manster

1959 science fiction horror film

Rating: 11/20

Plot: A crazed Japanese scientist is experimenting with human evolution in his secret laboratory conveniently located next to a burbling volcano. At the beginning of the movie, he has to kill off one of his mistakes, a killer ape man who was formerly the scientist's brother. Screaming in a cage, is a disfigured woman who was once the scientist's wife. As the scientist wonders who will be the next subject for his experiments, an American journalist wanders in to conduct an interview. The scientist asks him a few inappropriate questions, drugs and injects him, and sends him on his way. Instantly, the journalist's personality changes. He starts cheating on his wife and refuses to return home. Eventually, he starts noticing some physical changes as well, specifically the appearance of an eyeball on his right shoulder. It's not good.

The movie's also probably not good, but I enjoyed this little sucker. The intro is striking--bathing women, the appearance of a hideous ape man, a splash of blood, and the scientist's mutated wife (like a character from Freaks) screaming and shaking the bars of her cage. It all looks cheap but effectively creepy. It almost makes the next forty minutes or so a complete let-down as the filmmakers made the unwise decision to have some sort of plot and fail to maintain that level of creepiness, but it all picks up again when the guy unveils his shoulder eye, an area which eventually sprouts a head. It's one of those movie images that somebody watching this movie isn't likely to forget. I also really liked the build-up to that scene where theremin (or was that a saw?) music would play whenever the guy looked at or touched his shoulder. To be fair, the story in that intervening forty minutes is fairly interesting. I liked watching the journalist change psychologically before the physical transformations happened, possibly a metaphor for the "monsters" that men can become when they give in to temptation, drinking too much or cheating on their wives. This was a very B, Japanese/American co-production, and although the cheapness almost bleeds from the screen and the acting (especially Tetsu Nakamura, undoubtedly "acting" in a language he's not entirely comfortable with) is no good at all, they do quite a bit with very, very little. The Manster, also known as The Split and Doctor Satan and (most boringly) The Two-Headed Monster, is worth checking out.

"Oh, Snap! I'm not supposed to have an eyeball there!" (Note: Not an actual line from the movie.)

The Wolf Man

1941 monster movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: The second son of a rich guy, a guy rich enough to own his own telescope, ventures into town to pick up chicks. He buys a cane with a wolf's head in order to impress one, a gal he Peeping Tommed with the use of his daddy's telescope, and she recites poetry about werewolves. Then, they meet another character who recites the same poem about werewolves. Then, a pair of gypsies tell the guy all about werewolves and tell him he's about to be bitten by one. Then, he's surprised when he's bitten by a werewolf and turns into one himself. This ruins his plans to boink the gal he spotted with his daddy's telescope.

Some rich atmosphere, quality writing (despite what I wrote up there), and a monster you can connect with and feel sorry for save this one. The titular monster (is it obvious that I really like using the word titular?) is really pretty goofy looking. He really just looks like a hirsute guy with a terrible haircut who might be getting ready to go to a discotheque or might just stay home for the evening, sipping brandy and smoking his phallic pipe while leering at women through a telescope. And the wolf man really isn't in the movie very much. The back of the dvd box tells me that it took make-up people six hours to make Lon Chaney Jr. look like a wolf man and then three hours to make him look like Lon Chaney Jr. again. I think that was for only a single day (or night) of filming though because the wolf man doesn't do a lot. The great Bela Lugosi, here playing a gypsy wolf man and apparently too lazy to spend time with the make-up people so that he gets to be a wolf man on screen, also isn't in this movie nearly enough. Actually, you could argue that there's not nearly enough movie here. At a zippy seventy minutes, it all seems kind of rushed. I would have liked a little more character development and a lot more scenes of the wolf man raping people or biting chickens' heads off or doing something other than just running around the same few trees over and over again. And less lycanthrophy poetry! I do like some of the ideas the makers of this hint at about the duality of human beings (the werewolf as a metaphor), but just like a lot of the rest of this, it's only hinted at.

Titular.

Eegah

1962 masterpiece

Rating: 2/20

Plot: In a world where people don't move their lips when they talk, there's a giant caveman loose in the desert. He grunts "Eegah!" a few times, so everybody assumes that's his name because, you know, people usually go around saying their own names over and over again. A guy who claims to be a scientist, his daughter, and her rock 'n' rolling dune-buggy driving beau investigate.

The worst caveman movie I've seen all year, Eegah approaches a Manos or Yucca Flats level of ineptitude. The main issue is probably the sound. This might in fact be the worst sound editing in the history of cinema, and not just movies with caveman. It's almost like all the characters are ventriloquists with their volume rising and falling inexplicably. The best example is when the characters are following some footprints and this voice from the heavens, one that doesn't sound like any of the characters, warns, "Watch out for snakes!" while none of their mouths move. Eegah's grunts don't match his lips either, but the craziest sound problem is when Tommy (played by Arch Hall Jr. [the film was directed by Arch Hall Sr. by the way]) plays his guitar. He sings almost enough songs for this to qualify as one of the worst musicals ever (definitely the worst musical with a caveman), most of them as a serenade to his girlfriend Roxie even though he sings about somebody named Valerie in a couple of them. If you're keeping score at home, you shouldn't. Anyway, when Arch Hall Jr. plays his guitar and sings, a full ghost band accompanies him. He's got drums, background vocals, piano. Neat trick, Tommy! Eegah does have a bitchin' dune buggy in it. I know some of my readers are interested in dune buggies. In fact, this has the best scene featuring a caveman chasing a dune buggy with a stick that I'll probably ever seen. There's another great scene where Tommy and Roxie (or, more accurately, people who sort of look like Tommy and Roxie) are riding around the desert looking for her father, and Roxie keeps saying, "Whee! Whee!" Whee? They might have said that in the 1950s, Roxie, but this film was made in '62! This movie ends with a character talking about how giants must exist because they're written about in the Bible. I'm sure Bill Maher would have questions about that one.

Eegah, by the way, is played by 7'2" Richard Kiel who would use Eegah as a springboard to bigger and better things. Aside from playing Jaws in the James Bond movie, Kiel would get several opportunities to play thugs, tall goons, swamp monsters, tall men, and strong men.

Gammera the Invincible

1966 big monster movie

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Russian planes carrying nuclear bombs are shot down. This wakes up Gammera, a prehistoric turtle who eats fire, has the ability to fly, and destroys things. He's made of rubber.

The ensemble cast here just might be the worst ever assembled. And it's not the dubbing (although that is ridiculous) because the worst offenders are the American actors. The characters in this one somehow manage to be goofier than the monster, a giant rubber turtle that can scoot through the skies like a flying saucer and spew fire. There's the Japanese photographer who can't figure out what to take pictures of without being told. There's the Christian Eskimos who warn the Japanese visitors about a giant prehistoric turtle for absolutely no reason. And just the name "Gammera" spoken by Eskimos makes dogs bark and children scatter. There's the general who butchers his lines so badly that when the other characters in the room are shown, they all have expressions like they're expecting the director to yell "Cut!" and start over again. Then, the senator in the room impossibly ends up being worse! There's a dopey child actor, a kid so obsessed with turtles (of course) that his teacher is threatening to expel him from school. But standing above them all is the scientist Dr. Contrare who is shown debating another scientist on a television program. Bad acting is bad acting, and in a movie like this, it's often difficult for a bad actor to get his performance noticed. But Alan Oppenheimer's performance stands out, a crochet needle in a haystack of awful performances. You'll see Alan Oppenheimer's name as a nominee for the Torgo at the end of the year. There are some dazzling special effects in this movie--burning planes, toy boats, flying Gammera. There's an explosion described by a character with the "only a nuclear bomb can create an explosion like that" even though it looks like a cheap firecracker. And I never knew that train cars full of gas sound just like gun shots when they explode. The monster itself isn't too bad. He apparently likes children, enough for me to suspect that he's a pedophile. He doesn't seem like a very intelligent monster although he doesn't have any other weaknesses. As one scientist so expertly opines, once Gammera is on his back, he can't get on his feet again. Really? I could have been a scientist if that's all it takes. The destruction of the miniatures is entertaining, and I really like one terrible transition from an attack of an airport to a bunch of kids dancing to a rock 'n' roll song with lyrics that go "Gammera! Gammera! Gammera!" I'm easily entertained though. It all ends rather stupidly and then finds a way to end again more stupidly by throwing the words "Sayonara Gammera" on the screen.

Watched on the big screen at school with frequent interruptions from colleagues.

The Thing from Another World!

1951 science fiction movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Some army men discover a space ship buried in the ice somewhere near their Alaskan post. They decide to dick around with it and bring a space-monster-on-ice back to base. It turns out that he's a vegetable man! Vegetable man! He thaws, and havoc is wreaked.

A movie with a title this goofy isn't supposed to be this good. And speaking of the title, I'm sticking with the punctuation mark because the poster up there has one. Movies are always better when their titles include punctuation marks. Speaking of that poster, that's actually more of the monster than you get to see in the movie. It's more the suggestion of the monster, quicky glimpses, sound effects, and the after effects that create tension in this 50s Frankenstein-like-dude-on-the-loose flick. And the theremin-heavy score, of course. The winter wonderland setting also works well with the black and white to set the mood. Most interesting, I think, is the characters' banter, something that sets this apart from more ordinary science fiction movies from this time. You learn more about a lot of these people rather than just one or two of the most important ones, and there's a really interesting conflict other than the obvious man vs. space monster conflict. I also like the overlapping dialogue, almost reminiscent of Robert Altman. I think this one holds up very well. The fact that the monster is made out of celery is actually enough to make this a classic.

Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster

1964 monster mayhem!

Rating: 15/20

Plot: All kinds of stuff going on here. There's an assassination plot involving the princess from some anonymous country, a princess who, following her leap from a plane, decides that she's a Martian. You've got a giant, red-glowing, sometimes-magnetic space rock. There's some minuscule fairy twins who speak in unison and are BFF's with a phallic giant moth creature. Rodan and Godzilla reemerge and have trouble getting along. And a new threat to earth--a no-armed, three-headed, flying thing with terrible breath--needs to be stopped. Man, do the Japanese know how to bring it or do the Japanese know how to bring it?

What badass monster-on-monster-on-monster-on-monster action this one has! It took a bit of time to get to the monster fracases, but luckily, all the stuff involving the human characters was interesting enough to sustain. The other Godzilla movies I've watched had me really missing the guys in suits throwing rocks at each other and pushing each other around, but I actually enjoyed the parts of the plot involving the human characters. I really liked the main bad guy, a guy so bad that he never removes his shades. The bad guys, by the way, might be the worst "killers" (that's what they're called repeatedly) in movie history. I don't believe they succeed in coming close to killing anybody in this, do they? I'm not even sure they could hit a wall with a bullet if a wall happened to be their target. The princess is cute while the fairies (too little for me to use my "little person" tag) and the peripheral characters, mostly because of the terrific dubbing, cracked me up. I wish I had a pair of miniature fairies to keep me company actually. But the monsters are the stars of the show here, and in this one, you get four of them--Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, and the title villain. I'm still most impressed with the special effects that make Ghidrah work (still not sure how that happens actually), but it's a lot of fun watching Mothra wiggle around, Rodan pecking at Godzilla's head, and Godzilla getting angry and throwing a hissy-fit. The fight scenes were thrilling and hilarious. There's a wonderful scene where Godzilla and Rodan are playing volleyball with a rock, one of those scenes that starts stupid, goes on for far too long, keeps going long after any human being would think it could possible go on for, and finally becomes almost a religious experience, a work of dadaist art. Fist pumps may have been involved. I also really liked the score. One question though: How could the end of this movie actually have been the end of the movie? Ghidrah, a threat to destroy earth, flies away with his tail between his legs because he's got Mothra web all over his face? That really does him in? Seems like he could go wash that off and be back five minutes later to continue the fight.

Cory recommended this bad boy.

Where the Wild Things Are

2009 piece of garbage

Rating: 10/20 (Jen: 5/20; Emma: 5/20; Abbey: 1/20)
[Original "6" rating traded for a "10" with my brother.]

Plot: Max is youngster suffering from schizophrenia and endangering the lives of those around him. Where the Wild Things Are is a glimpse at his battered mind, a trip to his world inhabited by CGI-furballs. If there is ever a Where the Wild Things Are II, proving beyond a reasonable doubt that there is either no God at all or that He has abandoned us, it would most likely be about Max's experiences in an asylum.

This might be one of the most joyless film experiences I've ever had. There wasn't a single moment in this movie where I was glad I was watching it. In fact, I wouldn't have finished this if I had been watching it alone. And I had high hopes for this one, curious to see how Spike Jonze would be able to stretch a fairly thin picture book into a full-length movie. Turns out, he doesn't. This has virtually no plot, existing only as jumbled symbolism or half-assed allegory. The people part of the movie is depressing. The wild things part of the movie, a part I eagerly awaited as I figured it would be filled with fantastical imagery and whimsy, was somehow even more depressing. And the imagery? It just looks stupid. The monsters don't always move fluently, especially when they leap, and there's never enough background to make this look like a finished movie. All attempts to attach any of Max's fantasy to his real-world problems--childhood fears of things like war, the eventual demise of the sun, global warming, etc.; alienation; growing up fatherless--come across as offensive. There is absolutely no reason for children to see this movie, absolutely no reason for adults to see this movie, and absolutely no reason why this movie should have been gotten the greenlight in the first place. See that monster behind the tree in the poster? I can only imagine that he's trying to hide from embarrassment at his involvement in this movie. I sincerely hope this is the least enjoyable experience I have with a movie this year.

My brother tried to warn me about this one. I didn't dream it would be this abysmal.

The Mighty Peking Man

1977 monkey movie

Rating: 15/20 (Dylan: 8/20)

Plot: A expert hunter is called upon to find a giant ape that flattened a jungle village in the Himalayas. They travel to his supposed location, and after the group encounters a lot of problems, the hunter is abandoned. Oh, snap! Luckily for him, there's a scantily-clad jungle woman nice enough to help him out. And she just happens to be the Mighty Peking Man's girlfriend. To make a long story short--King Kong.

There are a lot of things about this movie that nearly convinced me it's the greatest movie ever made:

1) It's really a great telling of the King Kong story, much better than the dismal 70s version or that Peter Jackson masturbationathon.

2) The hero! He's savvy and brave, but he's also very human. The love triangle (actually, I guess it's a square) is realistic.

3) The giant ape! Like the brothers in War of the Gargantua, it's a guy in a velvety-fur suit. He stomps around, beats his chest, climbs buildings, throws rocks, squashes bystanders, swats at helicopters. He does everything that King Kong can do but in Chinese!

4) Watching the wild jungle girl climbing up and down a tree. It's likely the best tree-climbing scene in the history of cinema.

5) The miniatures. Does anybody use toy Tonka trucks and plastic tanks better than the Shaw brothers do in this? Loved watching the mayhem unleashed upon the big city once Peking Man escapes.

6) The dubbing. It's fairly enthusiastic, and I love how one very minor character pronounces it as PAY-king man. I don't know what nonsensical grunts sound like in Mandarin, but the English actress who dubs the jungle girl's in does a fantastic job.

7) Tiger vs. Man wrestling matches! And something you learn from The Mighty Peking Man: When a tiger bites a man's leg off, it's accompanied by a "ching" sound effect like you'd hear in a kung-fu movie. There's also a bitchin' elephant stampede. Jungle madness!

8) The music! The score's fantastic!

9) Possible wardrobe malfunctions.

10) I can't think of a tenth reason.

11) I can't think of an eleventh one either.

I've seen this movie twice now. Next time, I'm watching it with my pants off!