Roger Corman sci-fi triple feature!

Yesterday I got to see the classic Ridley Scott's Alien on the big screen, digitally restored in all it's glory. It was an amazing viewing experience, I know that sounds corny but it was true. Out of movies I have seen in theaters vs on a tv, this has easily been one of the biggest differences I have experienced. The scope and detail of the sets is astounding, the sound of the ship filling up a dark theater, it was something else. It is still playing at The Plaza Theatre in Atlanta until after this Thursday, 7/10/14 so if you can GO SEE IT! It is easy to see then when this movie first came on the scene how people would flock to copy it and make a buck, so without further or do lets look at a couple of attempts via the king of cheap cheese: Roger Corman, who made a couple of sci-fi movies heavily inspired by Alien in the early 1980's.

Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)
Ok, so this is a rip off of Star Wars primarily, and doesn't really have a connection to Alien, but I wanted to talk about it anyway. Predictably it starts off with a long shot beneath a huge space ship, which actually looks pretty good. The interior... not so much. The big ship is full of ass holes, which apparently have nothing better to do than be all empirey and conquer people who don't appear to have anything worth taking. The wizard of oz head booms our that he is gonna take this dirt planet's harvest, because EVIL. Oh wait, the poor agrarian people are going to get some mercenaries with hearts of gold to defend themselves from evil bastards who want their crops? Never seen that one before. They actually titled the Spanish dub The Magnificent Seven in Space, and Robert Vaughn was basically the same character in both this and Magnificent Seven. The main character reminds me of Sheldon from Big Bang Theory so I hate him. But its made up for by Hannibal from the A-Team being a literal space cowboy. As they mosey around they just about trip over people who want to help fight against the evil Sador, seems like if everyone hates him they should have kicked his ass already. In addition to Hannibal and Robert All-Business Vaughn they end up with a nerd girl who fixes things, some weird white dudes, a sexy viking chick with a ridiculous helmet, and a sleestak. Its pretty cornball, but there are some nice spaceship porn shots of the exteriors. The interiors are more Flash Gordon or Star Trek OS than gritty Ralph MacQuarry or HR Giger looking. Although one looks like a flying ball-sack. Not even joking. Or maybe they're boobs, it's right there on the poster. The movies is pretty damn ridiculous, and I am not entirely sure how much of it is intentionally goofy but you will definitely laugh at something.

Galaxy of Terror (1981)
Starting off with weird new-agey sci-fi spirituality mumbo jumbo (that barely comes into play agian through the rest of the movie) you might think this movie is gonna be a different type of shit. Actually it starts to get a lot better, especially the last 2/3rds of the movie. A weird demi god being that rules an space empire realizes one his ships found some ancient alien pyramid thing, and he wants more people to check it out. even though its evil and makes weird stuff happen. So they send a crack team of misfits with their own personal demons and some dirt between them. They fly over, fuck their ship up on the way down, explore the spooky pyramid and shit goes further south as they start to get picked off by a mysterious force that seems to play on their fears. Sid Haig plays a mute, because he hated his dialogue, and he probably gives the best performance of anyone here. Robert Englund is in this too but he was kind of under utilized, they could have had him go much crazier.There are some shots in the halls of the space ship where its really obvious that they used take out containers from McDonalds to decorate the halls. There are also some shots that look really cool and some neat effects. There are also some horribly cheesy sound effects, it is really hard to suspend your disbelief when the monster is making the same slobbery goop sound used in Scooby Doo. I really did enjoy this one, but it falls a little short of being actually pretty good which is really frustrating.

Forbidden World (1982, AKA Mutant)  Anyway the plot of this one involves a research lab on a remote planet that was attempting to genetically produce high-yield food or something. But Monsanto fucked up just like ally the hippies keep telling us and produce a damn monster that runs amok through the station and eats people and steals their DNA... or something. It is shameless in its ripping off of Alien. It does however include more gore and boobies, as a good ripoff should, also some really terrible synthesizer music. That being said there are some shots in this that are really cool, and only some of them involve tits. You may notice some similarities between the other movies I have mentioned, and by similarities I mean he recycled a bunch of shit. Particularly battle footage at the start from Battle Beyond the Stars, and the Big Mac container walls from the Galaxy of Terror set. What a forward-thinking, environmentally conscious producer! Remember, reduce, reuse, recycle! According to IMDB there during an early screening of the movie one viewer laughed out loud during a scene which Corman took as an insult and hit the dude. It's a pretty enjoyable flick, what it actually lack is a little more insanity and weirdness to push it over the edge of cult classic-ness. Its pretty straightforward bug hunt, and a serviceable vehicle for action and gore beats that only really lacks in film and sound clarity and the acting. The effects aren't really THAT bad, neither are the sets despite being partially made from take-out containers. My least favorite part is the child-like voice the android, robot guy has.

Out of the three, I think I enjoyed Galaxy of Terror the most, but I can see Battle Beyond the Stars being a more enjoyable experience for a group of friends drinking and watching something ridiculous. Galaxy of Terror was really close to being actually good, if it had just a bit more production value and maybe a script re-write.

Review: The Gorilla

The Gorilla (1939)

This is an incredibly hard movie to review, or easy. Yeah its easy, because its basically a three stooges rip-off about a guy in a gorilla suit who may or may not be murdering people and three bumbling detectives trying to figure out what is going on, and who fail miserably. That's really about it. Don't know what to say. Its only about an hour long

Just take three shots of whiskey and put on another movie...

Sorry this one sucks...I'll make it up to you one day.

Review: Attack of the Crab Monsters

Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)
Too many sea monster movies yet? The confusing thing about this one is that barely makes any use of probably the main reason to even make a beach monster movie: chicks in bikinis. Doubly weird is that its Roger Corman who is usually not shy about showing us some ladies. Instead the cast is almost entirely dude scientists. Its not bad though, well I mean its still entertaining, and its mercifully short at barely over an hour. It starts off with this crew of people coming ashore to this island, one guy falls out the boat and we get a quick glimpse of one of the crab monsters before they pull his headless corpse out of the water. We don't even know who these people are or what they are doing (except that one of them is the Professor from Gilligan's Island) before one of them gets killed! Corman doesn't like to waste time. They seem to be far less concerned than you would expect by this, and continue on with their mission, although we still have no clue what it is. This one fat french (I think) guy starts talking about how quiet it is there, and says something about talking to the voices of the people that used to be there (foreshadowing). I'll skip ahead to the part where they tell you each one of these guys and the one gal is a scientist in a different field and they are there to study the effects of radioactive fallout left over from an H-bomb test. What a simpler time this was. There was also another team there before them but it has since gone missing. The quickly realize that apart from seagulls and crabs there are no other living animals on the island. Time passes and they start hearing strange sounds at night, and eventually disembodied voices. They start trying to investigate and realize its all coming from giant crab monsters. The rest of the movie follows suit with them trying to survive which means killing the hungry hungry crustacean. The monster effects are awesome and its pretty great how it talks to them with the voices of the dead scientists, mostly trying to mock them. Its a fun little popcorn movie, an almost textbook example of hokey 50's atomic critter flicks.

We need something quick and dirty, just like Corman would do, something like an:

Atomic Crab Claw Shot

1 oz Clam juice (I'd use crab juice but I think that only exists in the Simpsons)
3 oz Vodka
1 oz Blue Curacao
2 oz warm clarified butter

Shake the first three ingredients with ice and strain and pour into a shot glass. Pound that shit down and chase it with clarified butter before you start hearing the voices. After you vomit you can wipe it up with your ascot.

Review: Blood Surf

Blood Surf (2000)

This movie is really stupid. I know that might be shocking, because normally movies about large animals eating people are really deep and nuanced. After the credit sequence the film starts off with a pair of surfer dudes, a douche bag TV producer and their Aussie camera-babe who have the ever so intelligent idea of inventing a sport they want to call... wait for it... blood surfing and film it for a tv documentary. I do want to mention that my favorite character is one of the surfers who is basically a skinny Guy Fieri who is really endearing at how much of a stupid douche bag he is. But what exactly is blood surfing? Its surfing with sharks of course! But your probably asking yourself now, isn't there a huge crocodile on the poster? Yes there is, and that's the joke. There is a very specific spot they want to do this, a particular body of water somewhere north of Australia inhabited apparently by sharks and south-east Asian stereotypes, but they need someone to take their dumb asses their because despite living in the area and sporting a Hawaiian shirt their chartered asian sea captain doesn't know how to get there. First we meet a very surly Australian sailor who says he wont do it, but he has as a bat-shit crazy American girlfriend who decides to awkwardly dance around the bar to really bad techno music as a way of changing his mind by annoying him into submission, apparently it works and he gives them directions to the island. Also that dancing scene is pretty incredible, not because it was in any way sexy, but in the way Brah Fieri reacts to it as if he is watching the single greatest thing in the history of the world. They set sail with the captain and his family, including his hot daughter who is coming on hilariously strong to Brah Fieri despite him being a total imbecile. They arrive at the place and start chumming the water to attract the sharks, which works. But that's not extreme enough for these dudes, oh-no. They cut open their feet to get the sharks that much more interested in them specifically. Now you can really get a sense of the level of intelligence we are dealing with here. They do their thing with some rad surfing shots and some really bad compositing of shark footage. After getting to the beach without getting bit by sharks they notice something big in the water and an explosion of blood and water as the croc eats one of the sharks. They decide to call it a day and they pair off and head into the jungle to bone, except the nice Asian couple. They get eaten by the giant crocodile. Because fuck them apparently. The daughter gets eaten too. Then they start fleeing into jungle from the thing and run directly into a camp of pirate rapists but are saved by the Australian guy from earlier. Unfortunately my favorite character gets eaten around this point and my interest started to go down-hill from here, despite the pace picking up. They spend the rest of the movie trying to kill the croc, but at some point they decide it would be a good idea to crash the boat so they can go back to the trap-infested rapist pirate island because somehow that's safer than just driving the boat back to someplace with a friendly navy. On the way back to the island the obnoxious tv producer gets eaten and no one bats an eye. Now that they are back on the island, which conspicuously now looks like miniature golf course with all the Styrofoam ruins and vines, they can spend the rest of the movie running from the awesomely bad animatronics and trying to figure out how to kill it in a series of adventure cliches including rickety rope bridges, crumbling ruins, and swinging vines. In the end it just kind of falls on a sharp rock and dies. I kind of rushed past through the last two acts, but i don't want to spend all night on this movie. Its a five-movement symphony of stupid, these have to be some of the dumbest characters I have ever seen, and I'm not entirely convinced this was supposed to be a comedy. I kind of expected cartoon sound-effects to go along with all the stupid shit they do in this movie. I went back and started watching it again as I wrote this, its impressive at how dumb it is. About the only thing that would have made this movie dumber was if they were cannibals in grass skirts instead of rapist pirates. I cant help but suggest this movie, although I don't really want to, maybe just to get a second opinion.

Ease the pain and confusion with a Bloody Surfer
.5 oz Midori
.5 oz Blue Curacao
2 oz  Grenadine
1 12oz bottle of Smirnoff Ice
Crushed Ice
This drink is as loud and colorful as your shirt, and so sugary it will make you puke on your flip flops. First spike your hair and put on your best Hawaiian shirt, but dont button it brah let the babes see your waxed chest. Fill half a Collins glass with the smirnoff ice and crushed ice, then try to layer the other ingredients in with the grenadine on top, be sure to flip the bottles around like an asshole while you do it. But then fuck it all up and just shake everything up in a Boston shaker and pour it into a tiki glass with an umbrella. Those are cool again apparently. Hopefully now everyone will mistake your stupidity for drunkenness, brah.

Review: Spawn of the Slithis

Spawn of the Slithis (1978)
A drive-in sea monster flick that takes heavy, ahem, inspiration from Jaws and The Creature From the Black Lagoon. The film starts off with the beast terrorizing the coastal community of Venice, California including dogs, bums, disgruntled husbands, etc. The plot, or at least the parts with talking revolve around a journalism teacher trying to figure out what's going on with all these strange attacks, he eventually meets up with various scientists who have discovered this stuff they call Slithis. Slithis is not the monster (that would be the spawn of Slithis, duh), the Slithis is organic "mud" brought to life from radioactivity leaking from the local power plant. Supposedly this sludge while feeding on other trash and dead fish started to form itself into a more stable structure taking on the characteristics of the stuff its been eating. What we get is a rubber fish-monster suit attacking folks in really poorly lit shots. Also there are a lot of goofy POV shots that I think were filmed with a bottle against the camera lens. The monster suit definitely takes some inspiration from Creature From the Black Lagoon but a little more bulky and slimy, it's one of the highlights of the movie for me personally. Eventually the reporter guy meets up with a fisherman who has a weird way of talking. I think they play it off with him being Jamaican but he doesn't have an accent, really its more like he just uses phrases I would expect from a beatnik, stoner-psuedo-intellectual. His is one of the few memorable performances along with the crazy, over-acted mayor. We get see the monster kill some people, a car driven off a dock, some boobies, and an awful lot of bad cinematography and editing. If you could somehow sit in your parked car at home and watch this, well without driving it into your living room, I think that would go a long way to enhancing this movie, its the kind of schlock that begs to be half-viewed through a steamed-up windshield or at least through beer-goggles. It is available on youtube so feel free to give it a shot, if any of this sounds appealing.

On a scale of radioactive chum sludge to fish head soup, I give it two dead dogs on a beach.

I'm also going to start suggesting alcohol pairings for these movies
Enjoy with a "Slithis":
1 can Shlitz lager (a shandy size is best)
1 tin of sardines
sea salt
Open the sardines first then rub rim of the can with juice from the sardines, then throw the sardines away or give them to your cat because no one really eats that shit, then roll the edge of the can with sea salt like a margarita glass. Open the beer, and place it in a brown paper bag and enjoy.
A beverage with all the greasy, salty charm of a fishing trawler, equally enjoyable by both dockworkers and hobos watching the drive-in from the edge of the woods.

Review: Creature

Creature (1985)
A complete and utter rip off  homage to Alien, but a really fun one. Two competing corporations have been exploring the solar system in the near-ish future. One makes a discovery on the moon Titan of some strange containers that can only have been left behind by an alien species. Well it breaks open immediately and starts wreaking havoc, then a quick cut and their ship slams into a space station. This is just the beginning. The company sends another team back to investigate further. Between a not-so-smooth landing and electrical storms on the planets atmosphere running interference on their computer systems the crew is already in a jam. By the way the crew is a typical assortment of older almost-tough-guy engineers and scientists and 80's babes. They make a couple discoveries, that there is a nasty alien life form about to eat them all, and that there was a crew from the rival, German space company there to investigate just prior to their arrival that also got got. They meet one survivor from the German expedition who wisely advises them to blow everything up and fly the fuck out of there. It takes the crew some time to get their ducks in a row, the plot stresses their dangerous condition because not only do they have this alien thing to deal with but they are running out of air and power too. Also the alien is capable of talking over peoples bodies, so their are sort of zombified slaves. So the movie also takes liberties from The Thing as well. One of the worst/best things about this one is the sound design, as the sound effects for the space ship operations are taken from a mixture of much older sci-fi movies and serials, video games, and Star Wars. I should mention though, that the sets are fairly well done, and the acting is really not that bad and it has some pretty good moments in it. We get 80's haircuts, some gorey kills, perky 80's tits, some funny moments like the German guy grabbing the ass of the female security officer while they are both in space suits, a pretty good looking alien costume that in no way took heavy inspiration from H.R. Giger's xenomorph designs, and a really great final moment that I don't want to spoil, but it might involve flying dragon kicking an alien with a bomb strapped to it out of an airlock and then shooting it. It's still on Netflix as of reviewing this, so I would recommend pouring a drink or two and giving this one a shot.

Review: Assault of the Sasquatch

Assault of the Sasquatch (2009)

Bigfoot double feature! Wells sort of, meant to squeeze it in yesterday but I had social obligations. This film has way more big foot mischief and murder than The Untold. This is exactly the kind of thing you want from a Bigfoot movie: cheesey, humorous, low-budget, monkey-suit mayhem. It starts off with a group of bear poachers hunting bears for their paws to sell on the black market as aphrodisiacs in China. I liked the guy using a slice of pizza as bait in the trap. Very soon they find something they weren't expecting and the Sasquatch kills off the other poachers. The leader of the trio of poachers is a grizzled old asshole who has some pretty funny lines throughout the movie. After finally tranquilizing the Bigfoot and putting it in the back of his truck he is arrested by park rangers and taken into the city (I believe this is supposed to be in Jersey) to jail. From here we get the b-story about the family of one of the rangers who made the arrest and why he had to leave the city police force. This exposition is cut in between scenes of the Sasquatch escaping the truck and wandering around the city getting into trouble like stealing a drunk guy's pizza and watching a girl shower and stomping her tiny dog. This kind of thing continues for a while until the cops realize there is a Sas' on the loose and also the poacher and another criminal. Everybody is hunting everybody and as folks are knocked off by the Sasquatch eventually it boils down to a final battle between the poacher and the Bigfoot. Its a fun movie, tongue-in-cheek but not quite cartooney. It's low budget for sure, so the acting is forgivable and the Sasquatch suit actually looks pretty decent. This is a fine monster movie, somewhere on the level of the made-for-tv syfy specials but with practical effects.

Review: Kill, Baby... Kill!

Kill, Baby... Kill (1966)

Kill, Baby... Kill! is another gothic chiller from Italian director Mario Bava, the second of his I've reviewed this month. A doctor is called to a village in the country where superstition still rules every day life. He is there to perform an autopsy on a dead woman who has died under mysterious circumstances. The villagers protest to this and see it as a mutilation of her corpse. The doctor is equally aghast at the superstitious practices of the villagers as they try to ward of the ghost of the baroness's daughter. The movie has a great feel to it with rich sets and awesome cinematography with some pretty inventive scenes, but I don't want to spoil them for you. Assuming you like Italian Horror or Vincent Price style gothic theater than this is a great popcorn flick for a dark and stormy night.

Review: The Marsupials (The Howling III)

The Howling III: The Marsupials (1987)

An Anthropologist tries to track down werewolves in Australia, which are really Tasmanian wolves (also sometimes called Tasmanian tigers, a real species now extinct of predatory marsupial). It might be surprising to you that a movie about Australian were-supials is really weird and goofy; its also really Australian but that only accounts for part of the weirdness. Easily the most (only) terrifying thing in this movie is bizarre baby were-supial thing and the scenes involving it crawling around in it's mother's pouch, they made me a little... uncomfortable. There is a suspicious lack of gore and violence, which I'm guessing has something to do with Australian censorship. The movie is weirdly edited and paced, with uncertain jumps in time and a confusing and abrupt change in the direction of the movie in the last act. The first act is pretty awesome, full of the kind of silly 80's monster movie stuff you would expect moving at lightning pace. Lead actress Imogen Annesley also makes the movie worth watching because she's really hot, in a Natalie Dormer kind of way... at least when the movie isn't focusing on her hairy marsupial pouch. The main problem I have with the movie is instead of leading up to an intense last-stand between the fugitive lycanthorpes and the police/army like you would think, we get a rather self-indulgent set of scenes of werewolf children growing up and mostly being accepted into society. I was kind of hoping for Ozploitation version of Dog Soldiers, not really sure what I got but I think I liked it.

Review: Shakma

Shakma (1990)

Roddy McDowall (Planet of the Apes) in a movie about a group of grad-students and their professor playing a live action role playing game in a locked-up science building, when a failed experiment turns a baboon rabid and sends it on a killing spree. They use a real monkey too. That's really all I should have to say to convince you to watch this one. Its just great to see a unique idea, you have these kids in a locked up tower treating it like a dungeon, and unbeknownst to them there is a real critter on the loose trying to kill them. Its pretty cool to see a real animal being used as monster, and not just a puppet or a guy in a suit. Not that I have anything against those, and speaking of which its great to see McDowall play opposite a real monkey. Its a fun romp with a little gore and some good laughs. Check it out.

Review: Strippers vs Werewolves

Strippers vs Werewolves (2012)

You probably wouldn't expect a lot from a movie called "Strippers vs Werewolves", and you would be right not to but it does at least have a lot of strippers and some werewolves. The really weird thing is that they are all British as this takes place in London. Makes sense for the werewolves, but I didn't know they had strippers in England. Shows what I know. Hopefully they don't actually dance to any of the terrible music that they do in this movie. There are quite a few decent gags in the movie that had me laughing and a little bit of good violence. It definitely leans much more on the comedy side of the horror-comedy axis. Somehow they got Robert Englund for one scene, and his is easily the best performance in the whole movie. If they got him to be more involved in the movie it might have actually been kinda good. You might also recognize the club owner, Sarah Douglas, as Queen Taramis from Conan the Destroyer. If you ever find yourself drunk and flipping through netflix, and if you associate with me you probably do, its worth checking out.

Review: The Mummy's Curse

The Mummy's Curse (1944)

This will be my innagural review for the project I have started, the goal is to have a review for a horror movie I have never seen before for each day of the month of October. Its mostly for my own amusement, but maybe I will get some of my friends to see some movies they otherwise wouldnt.
We are going to kick it off old-school with 1944's The Mummy's Curse. This would be one of the last original Mummy movies made by Universal, and the last time Lon Chaney Jr would wear the bandages for the role. The oddest thing about this movie is that its inexplicably set in the Louisiana swampland, where the previous two movies were set in New England. But it means we get to see 1940's stereotypes of Cajuns which is kind of entertaining. Its definitely not the best iteration of the plodding mummy looking for his undead girlfriend formula, but it has some fun moments.