RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[M.10rda]

INVASION OF THE ANIMAL PEOPLE (1959):
I had such fun w/ TERROR IN THE MIDNIGHT SUN that I figured I'd catch up on what crapmeister Jerry Warren did w/ the project after he bought the U.S. distribution rights. Short answer: Nothing positive! He did spend some non-zero amount of money hiring John Carradine (not in the original) to appear in two introductory shots, addressing the viewer and philosophizing very broadly on the nature of space travel. Someday maybe I'll try to create a list of how many films were re-released with new JC-intros or linking scenes - he must've made a lot of mortgage payments this way! He does a pro job as usual (at least through the 1950s) but unlike his added scenes in HALF-HUMAN, he disappears from sight after his two brief takes - and, more disappointingly, he says nothing about Bigfoot! Actually, this could well be footage that Carradine shot for an entirely different film!   

Anyway, at least he provides voice-over for the remainder of IOTAP... pleasantly though unnecessarily as the original film (unlike HALF-HUMAN's source material) is 97.5% in English anyway! I guess Carradine's narration helps (sort of) explain the new film's next sequence, which appears to be the only other new addition to TERROR...: very attractive brunette Barbara Wilson picks up another paycheck, waking up in a UFO-induced panic in her Hollywood bungalow before running through the nearby streets in a Laura Dern-in-INLAND EMPIRE freak-out and then being taken into police custody. After a psych eval, she's released, gets a one-sided/Godfrey Ho-like phone call from her scientist uncle from TERROR, then flies blithely to Sweden to cavort on the slopes, never again mentioning her extraterrestrial-fueled breakdown.

Warren's negligible additions to TERROR in no way warrant a revisit, but much worse still is what Warren removes....... Wilson's scintillating if wholly gratuitous nude shower scene!!! I guess even a glimpse of boob-n-butt, not to mention a lingering wide-shot through a sheer shower curtain, was still too racy for Americans in '59. Unfortunately it's far-and-away the highlight of TERROR until Bigfoot shows up! I will say one thing for INVASION... - the print is in such poor, grainy condition that it actually makes TERROR's corny Bigfoot suit look much creepier than it does in the pristine restoration of TERROR! But unless you are capable of finding Bigfoot at all creepy (as I am), just watch TERROR instead.
2/5
Either MST or Rifftrax or possibly both have given INVASION their treatment and I'm sure that's worth watching, but I need a Bigfoot break...

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Cry of the Werewolf (1944)
https://youtu.be/KVPVamWH6Yk?si=QoeSj6WrgiSBJ7_U

A researcher has converted a New Orleans house into a museum for vampires, voodoo & werewolves, emphasis on the werewolves, as one may have lived there a generation earlier..... He gets murdered after learning about a secret crypt in the house....
Afterwards, his son & Transylvanian secretary then aid the police in looking for the killer, while looking into a band of gypsies that camps out on the property once a year....

Slow & plodding, even for just an hour.....

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
Curse of the Aztec Mummy (1957)
https://youtu.be/AjhAMah24OI?si=A-ft3QjdwzNTbnxg

Criminal Mastermind, The Bat is in police custody, and his goons already plan to bust him out.... They ambush the prison bus, but luchador The Angel shows up only to be overpowered....
The Bat is after an Aztec treasure that leads to another Aztec treasure, by kidnapping the girlfriend of a scientist who's into past life hypnotism....

About an hour long, & watchable.....

[M.10rda]

GALLERY OF HORROR (1967):
Directed by David L. Hewitt, who made MONSTERS CRASH THE PAJAMA PARTY, which I quite like in spite of it being incomplete rubbish. Shame on Hewitt for making this one, though, and shame on me for wasting time watching it! I knew he directed it and knew John Carradine was in it when I decided to watch it, but I swear I didn't know this was still another movie where Carradine addresses the audience directly and vaguely "narrates". I might as well place a small wager in Vegas on the odds Carradine will do this every time I start watching one of his movies, I'm batting 1.000 for the past three.

Standing to the left of a still from Roger Corman's THE TERROR  JC introduces five very cheap, simple stories that mostly serve as excuses for predictable "twist" endings, and most of which I will spoil for you right now to save you the trouble. There's no twist in the first one, which is probably the weakest (quite a feat) in spite of Carradine also appearing as a supporting character. An annoying young married couple buy an old Boston manor which includes a grandfather clock that a Dr. Scott-ish professor tells them was owned by a witch, and (no surprises here) it was. The second story is called "King Vampire" and is a boring Jack The Nibbler-period whodunnit with a gender reveal twist that's only worth mentioning because the two detectives are literally too chauvanistic to see it coming. Story III is - actually this one might be worse than the first one! There's a mad scientist-turned-undead lich who wants revenge for marital infidelity, sort of an inversion of the Leslie Neilson episode from CREEPSHOW, but no twist, Snore! (It does contain more B-roll filched from THE TERROR, if that excites you.)

I guess I could praise Hewitt for saving "the best" for last? Story #4 is probably my favorite    in that it offers a little more in the way of Bad Movie amusement. Lon Chaney Jr is one of three idiot would-be Frankensteins who successfully revive a corpse and then immediately decide it was a bad idea. I chuckled at this one - at it, not with it. The grand finale [sic] is also less anti-fun than the first three, though it betrays that Hewitt had insufficient ideas for a quintuple-feature, as he gives us another vampire story. "Count Alucard"  is just the first act of every version of Dracula again, only the twist at the end is that Jonathan Harker is a werewolf. 

Other than Carradine and Chaney you'll recognize no other actors at the beginning of GALLERY OF HORROR, but you'll recognize them at the end, 'cause the same community theatre rejects keep reappearing in every story. The entire film (and especially Carradine's  rambling, largely non-sequiterial host segments) could be the product of AI screenwriting, if AI had been around in the 60s. Carradine even introduces Chaney's installment as being set in Scotland in the 1800s. Blood-Wipe to Chaney's lab and all three doctors are speaking in American accents, w/ 60s hair and wardrobe, and then Chaney's telephone rings.
1.5/5
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