Dinosaurs!

Dinosaurs!

United States - 1994

Diamond Entertainment, 1994, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 38 minutes

Yog Monster From Space

Yog Monster From Space

Japan - 1970

Director - Ishiro Honda

Movie Favorites (Trans-Atlantic Video Inc.), 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 24 minutes

A few months back I shared an awesome poster for this Kaiju movie. I really wanted to see the film, but the version available on DVD has the original title Space Amoeba, and features a totally different photo cover. I really like the poster art! As it happens this VHS tape showed up shortly thereafter but something seemed a bit strange about it. It looks to me like someone did a quick copy of the poster. It's a pretty close reproduction as far as composition goes, but the quality of detail is much less on this box. But hey, it matches the quality of the film print!

Ahhhhh, public domain VHS.

Anayway here a few more posters I found.

This nice lobby card comes thanks to Black Hole Reviews

This poster thanks to Super Punch

This one from Toho Island

Yog: Monster From Space

Yog Monster from Space

1970 - Japan

Director - Ishiro Honda

My friend over at Manchester Morgue has been turning me on to some great kaiju movie music, and consequently I have giant monsters on the brain. This US poster (from IMPAwards) sure is awesome, too bad I can't find any artist signature to give credit where it's due.

Godzilla: Monster of Monsters NES

Who knew? Not me anyway. My partner, witnessing my recent renewed interest in Kaiju picked this up for me at the retro game store.

Godzilla vs. Megalon

Godzilla vs. Megalon

Japan - 1976

Director - Jun Fukuda

Goodtimes Home Video, 1985, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 30 minutes

 All three of these are from Wrong Side of the Art

This is only the first page of an United Statesian promotional comic. You can find the rest over at Magic Carpet Burn where they have also been kind enough to share the Godzilla vs. Megalon soundtrack.

Night of the Lepus

 

Night of the Lepus

United States – 1972

Director – William F. Claxton

Monster movies come in all sorts of forms, subgenres and species. Monsters both in literature and in cinema are almost always a symbol for something more than just a monster. Night of the Lepus ranks alongside such trash classics as Them! , Slithis and Godmonster of Indian Flats as one of my favorite among the nature twisted by science flicks. Fear of atomic power, industrial pollution and even computers have all become cultural boogeymen reformulated as screen monsters. “Progress” is scary because it’s unpredictable, and because man’s intellectual reach outdistances his ethical grasp, and so on and so forth….

It wasn’t until a second watch through of Night of the Lepus that it suddenly dawned on me that the film is a not so thinly veiled parable for the issue of Mexican immigration that has repeatedly proven anathema to deluded United Statesian racists since at least the 19th Century. The rabbit metaphor should be a familiar one, although parallels between “breeding like rabbits” and well established stereotypes about low income ethnic groups are rarely drawn explicitly. “Takeover” by the exponentially reproducing vermin, which threatens to subsume their typical hardworking all-American victims and ruin their good cultural traditions is clear enough. In Night of the Lepus the growth of the rabbits to human proportions and their proclivity for fresh blood and flesh remains mysteriously unexplained leading me to believe that not only are regular sized rabbits just not scary, but that these Lepus are meant to be even more like their analogues, making them still scarier.

The solution in Night of the Lepus, as parroted time and again in real life immigration paranoia rhetoric and literally realized along the large portions of the U.S. Mexico border, is a giant fence. Not only does this one keep them out of “our” territory, but it's also electrified such that any invaders attempting to cross it are thoroughly electrocuted to crispy death.

It is likely true that we often find the evidence we’re looking for. The fact that the film was set in Arizona although based on a novel (Year of the Angry Rabbit) set in Australia, and that it so clearly reproduces established stereotypes about Mexican immigrants in an era immediately following the end of the Bracero Program (and new immigration legislation) is too much coincidence for me to bear! Night of the Lepus is nothing more than a hilarious and ludicrous reification of United Statesian white supremacist paranoia, but damned if it doesn’t make for some entertaining cinema.

Once you know what the movie is about, the posters become even more awesome.
This one is from The League of Dead Films

Is the tagline in this ad meant to mimic the 1967 race-film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

 Ads from Criticonline.

The Last Dinosaur

 

The Last Dinosaur

United States/Japan – 1977

Directors – Alexander Grasshoff, Tsugunobu Kotani

MNTEX Entertainment, 1990, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 30 minutes

As this last wheeze of a dying paradigm flickered blurily across my tiny CRT screen, I felt as if I were strapped into a hideous future indoctrination machine, being force-fed stale propaganda reels from a distant historical backwater. It was Brazil in my screening room and I grit my teeth through every tired nugget of delusion that was unsurreptitiously launched at my retinas. As if by sheer volume I might be convinced that things still were the way we wish they used to be.

This revisionist PSA opens with an immediate introduction to the protagonist well ensconced in his milieu. Masten Thrust, played by the visibly decaying body of Richard Boone, longs for the finger-snapping and eye-winking charisma he fancies himself to have had in those heady days before he slid into wearing his boiler-suit everyday instead of just weekends. Forced by the terrifying passage of time to reanimate the corpse of his youth, he struggles valiantly against terminal elderliness by emphasizing an extreme and cartoonish version of a wishful memory of virility. Somehow, by increasing to nearly toxic levels the concentration of noxious manliness he exudes, he can surely paper over 50 years of entropy.

After dismissing his latest female companion with an airline ticket to “wherever it is I found you”, he heads over to his press conference room to announce his plan to penetrate the arctic. It is there, while probing for oil in his cylindrical probe ship that his last expedition discovered a strange tropical island inhabited by a creature that appears (though at that distance we were unable to be certain) to be a man in a top-heavy Tyrubbersaurus rex suit. Our ironically named geriatric protagonist plans to travel back to this land that time forgot in his clearly labeled Thrusting cylinder craft and study/hunt what he believes is the infamous “last of the dinosaurs”.

Hey wait, there's two?

Harnessing the power of a fictional-future science The Last Dinosuar attempts, like the man upon whose weary frame it is hitched, to call forth a fond memory to conceal the lack of its substance. As if by packing together H.G. Wells/Edgar Rice Burroughs paleo-science-fiction and the keening howl of that Nipponese behemoth it could imbue itself with a ghost of cultural relevance. The irony of this snake-eating-its-tail premise was not lost on the person’s responsible for this grainy televisual delusion. With all the subtlety of a shotgun, the double entendre of the title is laid bare in the awe inspiring theme song “The Last Dinosaur”, performed by iconic jazz singer Nancy Wilson. Throughout the tune, the lyrics make no reference whatsoever to the obese thunder lizards, but explicitly describe the film’s geriatric cad protagonist.

In the end of course, there is no evading the vicious hands of time, and realization finally catches up to the spent Thrust. When his surviving companions decide to return home, he opts to stay in the past where he belongs, with his teeny-armed philosophical brother and let the paleo-time-travel genre finally fade into a fond memory.

Godzilla vs. Monster Zero

Godzilla vs. Monster Zero

Original Title - Great Monster War (怪獣大戦争, Kaijū Daisensō?)

Japan - 1966

Director - Ishiro Honda

Paramount Home Video, 1983, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 33 minutes

Until this last week, I probably hadn't seen a Godzilla movie in 10 or 12 years. I was at my favorite bar and the bartender Danny was playing old VHS tapes on the TV, one of which was this kaiju classic. It may be old news to a number of you, but even without the dialogue I was totally thrilled with this movie and had a hard time focusing on the conversation I was supposed to be having. Consider me a born again Godzilla fan.

These two beautiful posters come from Space Monster.

This poster for the double bill comes courtesy of Emovieposter.

 These two come courtesy of Wrong Side of the Art. I would be willing to eat a small horse for a copy of that long format one. Damn that's awesome.

German poster courtesy of Tomb It May Concern

The Crawling Eye

The Crawling Eye

A.K.A. The Trollenberg Terror

United Kingdom - 1958

Director - Quentin Lawrence

Starring - Forest Tucker and Janet Munro

I used to hate black and white monster movies but this was one of the first ones I was able to appreciate. Among all the Evil Dead and Re-Animator I was watching back then, the giant tentacled eyeballs of The Crawling Eye struck a chord that has reverberated ever since.

The classic poster image and below, a VHS box with a Munsters tie-in thing going on.

I found these images a long long time ago so I have no idea where I got them. If they are yours let me know and I'll give you credit.

Them!

Them!

United States - 1954

Director - Gordon Douglas

A classic atomic monster movie and one of my favorites of the era.

Reptilicus

Reptilicus

Denmark/US - 1961

Director - Sidney Pink

Orion Home Video, 1994, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 22 minutes

This used to be one of my favorite movies to hate. It really is as terrible as people say, but I guess since my last viewing almost ten years ago my tastes have, ummmmmm, matured? I love it now. Reptilicus is on par with The Giant Claw for howling-laughter, rubber-monster fun, if just a little bit slower and dumber. But at least you can't see the wires, wait is that a bad thing? I love how you needed approval to rent Reptilicus at this particular store. Whatever for, did they warn you at the counter that it was terrible so you didn't ask for your money back on return?

Watch the Reptilicus trailer at Cult Trailers

 This one from Paleoblog

This pic from Micro-Brewed Reviews

See piles more Reptilicus stuff at Random Acts of Geekery.

Blood Beach

Cover scan courtesy of itsonlyamovie.co.uk

Blood Beach
United States - 1981
Director – Jeffrey Bloom
Media Home Entertainment, 1982, VHS

Just moments after the opening shot, shit, in the opening shot, a granny is sucked screaming, into the sand of an LA beach while her dog and a harbor patrolman look on. Sadly the patrolman, Harry, knows the old lady and all the more traumatic for him, used to date her daughter Catherine. It might not have gone any farther than that as far as Harry is concerned, except that the following night, in an epically metaphorical cross cutting of scenes, Harry gets it on with his sexy foreign stewardess girlfriend while simultaneously the granny's dog gets its head ripped off on the same stretch of beach. Now Catherine, a sensitive artist type, arrives in town and Harry’s all nervous and twisted up with inrequited "harbor patrol" duties.

Meanwhile, on the scene to investigate, is a pair of perfect character actor cops. Uncouth, unkempt and unruly ex-Chicago cop Royko (Burt Young from a million things) and his scolding fatherly Lieutenant (Otis Young) a stern and overly serious "black cop". Permissably perplexed, the cops have nothing to go on until the next day when a rich bitch on the beach gets her legs chewed on. Enter the big man on precinct, tough as nails Capitan, John Saxon (Cannibal Apocalypse, Nightmare on Elm St.) who orders the entire beach exhumed by a backhoe.
Nothing.

Saxon, a media vulture, and Royko (Young)

For no reason except perhaps to compensate for the relative timidity of scares thusfar in the film, the script resorts to a simple "unexplained noise + cat jumping out of nowhere" ploy, which on second thought only morosely emphasizes the previous fact. As if that weren't enough. When Harry's goofy partner, affectionately called "Hoagy", parts ways with his girlfriend, she gets sexually assaulted under the pier but throws the guy off. Crawling towards her, apparently while fully erect and penetrating the sand, his weiner is gruesomely removed by the sand creature. Follow wiener joke.
Next it's Harry's girlfriends turn to go under, and while the all the backhoes in the world didn't find shit the first time, this time one guy with a spade is able to find her eyeball, solidly placing her in the dead meat category and sealing Catherine's place at the top while nonetheless steeling Harry's resolve.



At this point it's clear that despite the best efforts of a generally talented crew of actors this movie is not going to deliver on the serious meat, or creeps. John Saxon himself cracks down on his boys and pushes them toward the inevitable sideline role all cops play in this type of watered down everyday-quasi-hero horror flick. Harry will inevitably discover the solution somehow linked to his and Catherine's past relationship. And while the cops will execute the final actual kill, Harry will be the artistic father of the operation, and receive the movie's only real hero medal, the girl.

Despite its relative predictability, Blood Beach holds great promise, never altogether delivered, but certainly promised. There's an assload of talent here, and the fact that the monster is based on a real life insect, the Ant Lion, is pretty rad. I thought those bugs were pretty creepy when I was a kid. Here though, the concept isn’t played to its full potential and when it comes so close to the end, there’s no time to let the full weight of the idea sink in. Seeing people getting sucked into the sand and gored is awesome, but there's not enough of it to make all the talent interesting, and the strain between moments of each is only just bridgeable by intoxication.

Some poster art, mostly in languages I don't understand, the last looks like a double feature of some kind.