Not Of This Earth!

Not Of This Earth is a horror movie pretending to be a science fiction movie, and those are movies I usually like quite a bit. I like this one too, but being a Roger Corman low-budget affair, it has its weaknesses of course.

Not among those weaknesses is the vivacious Beverly Garland, an actress I first encountered on TV's My Three Sons and was startled a bit to discover had such a racy past in small-budget films. She plays a nurse in this one dispatched to tend to a weirdo in sunglasses who spends a few minutes most days stealing blood, sometimes from living people. Garland when she's on the screen though is the show and has a particularly erotic stockings scene just about in the middle of the movie.

Alongside Garland is Paul Birch who plays the part of the alien vampire. He's come to Earth through a dimensional doorway to find a place for his dying people to live as their home world though this is a bit confused. He knocks you out with his wicked eyes then sucks out your blood with a hand machine he carries in a metal briefcase. He's a demanding S.O.B. and has Garland and some gangster punk working for him while he wanders around killing people.

Often in these movies the authorities are inefficient or ineffective and that proves to be the case here. While there is a lot of furious rumbling across the streets and parkland grass on motorcycles, the cops despite having inside information (one cop's girl friend is Garland) they seem unable to understand the nature of the threat or to be able to locate it until the very end. Particularly memorable is the debut appearance of Dick Miller in a Corman flick, who plays an unlucky vacuum cleaner salesman.

Aside from some terrifically painful looking eye lenses that Birch has to wear at times, there are few special effects in this one. Paul Blaisdell though did supply a transportation booth which has some spinning knobs (which apparently, they forgot to turn on all the time) and a little flying beastie which looks like a cross between a beach ball and a swimming cap. But this show ain't about special effects, if you buy the story, it's because of the acting and for a movie of this stripe the acting is well above average in most instances.

NOTE: This is a Dojo Revised Classic Post. 

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Invasion Of The Saucer-Men!

Invasion of the Saucer-Men is a hoot! For all those who think that UFOs are absurd, I gleefully offer up this gem. It's a comedy all about alien invaders. The invaders are the classic little green men, but with a terrifying twist. They are hideous little trolls with hypodermic fingers filled with alcohol which when injected into a human being might be fatal under the right conditions. 

These little buggers land at night in a distant cow field owned by a disgruntled farmer who is certain all the trouble is being caused by teenagers who use his land for romance. The story is told by a traveling salesman who has an inebriated partner (Frank Gorshin of Riddler fame) who actually is the first to encounter the aliens. 

At the same time two youngsters plan to elope but the aliens get in the way literally when the teens run one over with their car. The complications come quickly in this very short movie, and with confused police and even some military types who are eager to cover up the arrival of the aliens, the action never really stops. 

This is a light-hearted romp. The aliens are menacing, but not that scary despite being rather hideous. The make up is by Paul Blaisdell who designed many of the era's most mind-boggling creepy creatures. He does a bang up job here as well and the story goes that he plays one as well. The beauty of this movie is that it doesn't wear out its welcome. It's fluff with just enough in the way of sci-fi effects to make the story click along. 

(Albert Kallis Art)

This little romp from outer space is highly recommended. 

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The Day The World Ended!

What grim movie is Day the World Ended. In that classic canard the movie starts at the "End" and finishes at the "Beginning", but in between we get a glimpse of how some sorts of people might face the end of modern society after the bombs drop. It's not a happy look.

A man and his daughter await her boyfriend as the bombs shellac the world outside an isolated valley which seems to have a gap in which radiation can only enter slowly. The boyfriend does not appear (we think) and instead we get a hood and his stripper girlfriend, an old prospector and his jackass, and a heroic engineer. All of them share the dwindling abundance as they wait to see what will emerge from the atomic fog above the lip of the canyon. One other gets in their midst, a man already irradiated enough to die but who hasn't and instead is changing. He goes up top quite a bit and reports that a new civilization is taking form,  a savage world of kill or be killed and riding on top of this new world is a singularly deadly creature. Of course that creature (designed and played by Paul Blaisdell) ends up finding his way into the valley.

There's death, betrayal, faith, and sacrifice as the story unwinds. Sadly though it's all too easy to forget the devastation as the survivors have it pretty comfortably, at least for the time being. Then mutants from above find their way in and danger abounds. Somehow they find a silver lining in this dark tale, but seeing is believing.

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Beast With A Million Eyes!

The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes is a movie which tries to hit way above its average. The concept is really high but the production itself is so meager that even basic storytelling and coherence is often lost as the movie shambles along to a conclusion.

We meet a family, isolated on a failing date farm who seem to be at war with one another. The father feels the failure of the farm and it ways heavily as he tries to care for his grown daughter, a young woman ready for college and the outside world but who is stranded on something of a reverse oasis with only a German Shepherd for companionship though there is a boyfriend who pops up later. The mother is a wreck, feeling lost and aimless and old and jealous of the promise her daughter has before her and expressing bitterness to all. Then there's "Him", a mute giant of a man who lives alongside this family and works for them. The father says he's harmless, but the multitude of erotic pictures on his humble wall and his desire to watch the daughter when she's swimming suggests that he might not be so.

Into this domestic scene arrives a spaceship which embeds itself into a hole in the desert and begins to exert a control over the wildlife in the area. The influence is first detected when birds attack the father, then later an elderly neighbor has problems with his normally sedate milk cow. Finally the trusted pet dog attacks the Mom and she is forced to kill it. That brings the tension in the family to a head and they actually begin to bond as they slowly but steadily realize the enormity of the threat to them all.

Now that sounds like it would be a humdinger of a movie and it would if there had been any more money for some better sets or better sound or better special effects for Paul Blaisdell in his first outing making a movie monster, or whatever. Also the editing is a disaster in many places and the story rambles along, holding interest in spite of the many defects.

I cannot really recommend this one,but neither do I wish to dissuade you from watching. It's just on the edge of being a decent movie, it just barely misses the mark.

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Not Of This Earth!

Not Of This Earth is a horror movie pretending to be a science fiction movie, and those are movies I usually like quite a bit. I like this one too, but being a Roger Corman low-budget affair it has its weaknesses of course.

Not among those weaknesses is the vivacious Beverly Garland, an actress I first encountered on TV's My Three Sons and was startled a bit to discover had such a racy past in small-budget films. She plays a nurse in this one dispatched to tend to a weirdo in sunglasses who spends a few minutes most days stealing blood, sometimes from living people. Garland when she's on the screen though is the show and has a particularly erotic stockings scene just about in the middle of the movie.

Alongside Garland is Paul Birch who plays the part of the alien vampire. He's come to Earth through a dimensional doorway to find a place for his dying people to live as their home world though this is a bit confused. He knocks  you out with his wicked eyes then sucks out your blood with a hand machine he carries in a metal brief case. He's a demanding S.O.B. and has Garland and some gangster punk working for him while he wanders around killing people.

Often in these movies the authorities are inefficient or ineffective and that proves to be the case here. While there is a lot of furious rumbling across the streets and parkland grass on motorcycles, the cops despite having inside information (one cop's girl friend is Garland) they seem unable to understand the nature of the threat or to be able to locate it until the very end. Particulary memorable is the debut appearance of Dick Miller in a Corman flick, who plays an unlucky vacuum cleaner salesman.

Aside from some terrifically painful looking eye lenses that Birch has to wear at times, there are few special effects in this one. Paul Blaisdell though did supply a transportation booth which has some spinning knobs  (which apparently they forgot to turn on all the time) and a little flying beastie which looks like a cross between a beach ball and a swimming cap. But this show ain't about special effects, if you buy the story it's because of the acting and for a movie of this stripe the acting is well above average in most instances.

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Dojo Classics - The She-Creature!

The She Creature is yet another of those vintage monster flicks which has eluded me until I got hold of a copy and enjoyed it recently. The monster, designed by Paul Blaisdell, has been part of my imaginative world since I first got a look at on an old issue Famous Monsters of Filmland with a wonderful cover which I recently learned was by Ron Cobb.

This was another look at some artwork he'd done for an earlier Warren Magazines project dubbed Monster World.

The story is purports to be based on true event,  not quite what I expected. It has elements of The Mummy, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, with a dash of Mandrake the Magician thrown in to boot. The story concerns Dr. Carlo Lombardi,  an unscrupulous tuxedo-wearing stage hypnotist (Chester Morris) who has under his thrall a lovely  young woman named Andrea Talbot (Marla English) and is somehow able to tap into her long-ago life as a prehistoric sea-monster and bring that monster into the modern world.

The notion is that we all have lived many many lives over the eons, and some of those lives were not human. A rather severe and forlorn looking scientist, Dr. Ted Erickson (Lance Fuller) slowly discovers the situation, especially when Lombardi uses the beast to commit murders. The infamy of the murders cause mildly greedy publisher Tim Chappel (Tom Conway) to try and make Lombardi a celebrity and sell books on the back of that. Both men do quite well financially, but eventually it all goes to smash.

It's a much more complicated story than you'd actually expect for a monster movie. That is likely due to its source, the story it's based on, a notorious news item of the day in which a woman Virginia Tighe claimed to have been reincarnated many and once was known in years previous as Bridey Murphy. To be fair to the movie, there is some strong attempts to bring out some distinctive characters and explore some odd relationships. They fall short, but they try. But the story really picks up when the monster appears out of a hazy mist and wreaks whatever havoc is called for. The monster design is an oddity. It's not really good, but it's incredibly memorable and while there's little time explaining it all, the whole of the yarn does add up.

This isn't by any means a bad movie, but it's not really a good one either,not in any objective sense. But it is entertaining at times. It performs as genre flicks of this kind ought, supplying the necessary distractions at the proper moment.  It's well worth checking out.

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Ghost Of Dragstrip Hollow!

I don't know what made me watch Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow -- really I don't. Maybe it's the oddball blending of hotrods and haunted houses and I had a lame curiosity to see how this shambles might unfold. It was a shambles and it did unfold, but weirdly it was fascinating to watch.

The reason is simple - Paul Blaisdell. Paul Blaisdell was a monster maker on the cheap who worked for Roger Corman, the meister of many a low-budget bonanza. Contracted to develop weird creatures of all stripes for movies which offered only really exposure Blaisdell managed somehow to make the absurd fall into place. If the phrase "suspension of disbelief" ever meant anything, it's what happens when you behold a Blaisdell monster amble onto the screen.

This movie begins as a hotrod movie, dedicated to teen car culture of the late 50's. Hipster lingo and beach music dominate a story of a hot-rod gang trying to go legit and find success of sorts in the adult world which looks down upon their hobby. The movie works mightily to make hot-rodding seem like a normal teen activity and suggests that it can be pursued with relative safety and order if the adults would only see their way clear to give the kids a chance. There are glimmers of rumbles as rival hotrodders show up and make some noise but any action, apart from a race at the very beginning of the movie is off-screen.

The movie gins up finally to its main point when the hot-rodders looking for a new hangout try out an old haunted house. Despite all manner of noises, groans, moans, and visitations they remain committed to the joint and hold a ghost ball which serves as good cover for the monster to slither out among them unnoticed. That monster is quite recognizably the "She-Creature" from the movie of the same name, the creation of Paul Blaisdell.

As the movie winds up, the monster is unmasked and it turns out to be the monster-designer Blaisdell himself who proclaims that he's done with the business. As it turns out, he was and went off to work as a carpenter and on the fringes of the movie business until his untimely death.

This ain't a good movie by any stretch, but it does hold your attention somehow, like a car wreck designed by Dali. See for yourself.



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The She-Creature!

The She Creature is yet another of those vintage monster flicks which has eluded me until I got hold of a copy and enjoyed it recently. The monster, designed by Paul Blaisdell, has been part of my imaginative world since I first got a look at on an old issue Famous Monsters of Filmland with a wonderful cover which I recently learned was by Ron Cobb.

Ron Cobb

The story is purports to be based on true event,  not quite what I expected. It has elements of The Mummy, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, with a dash of Mandrake the Magician thrown in to boot. The story concerns Dr. Carlo Lombardi,  an unscrupulous tuxedo-wearing stage hypnotist (Chester Morris) who has under his thrall a lovely  young woman named Andrea Talbot (Marla English) and is somehow able to tap into her long-ago life as a prehistoric sea-monster and bring that monster into the modern world. The notion is that we all have lived many many lives over the eons, and some of those lives were not human. A rather severe and forlorn looking scientist, Dr. Ted Erickson (Lance Fuller) slowly discovers the situation, especially when Lombardi uses the beast to commit murders. The infamy of the murders cause mildly greedy publisher Tim Chappel (Tom Conway) to try and make Lombardi a celebrity and sell books on the back of that. Both men do quite well financially, but eventually it all goes to smash.

It's a much more complicated story than you'd actually expect for a monster movie. That is likely due to its source, the story it's based on, a notorious news item of the day in which a woman Virginia Tighe claimed to have been reincarnated many and once was known in years previous as Bridey Murphy. To be fair to the movie, there is some strong attempts to bring out some distinctive characters and explore some odd relationships. They fall short, but they try. But the story really picks up when the monster appears out of a hazy mist and wreaks whatever havoc is called for. The monster design is an oddity. It's not really good, but it's incredibly memorable and while there's little time explaining it all, the whole of the yarn does add up.

This isn't by any means a bad movie, but it's not really a good one either,not in any objective sense. But it is entertaining at times. It performs as genre flicks of this kind ought, supplying the necessary distractions at the proper moment.  It's well worth checking out.

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Day The World Ended!

Day the World Ended is an oddball movie. It is one of the gloomiest visions of life after the utter destruction of society and at the same time one that shows very little of that actual destruction. The latter of course because of budget concerns. This movie is famous or perhaps infamous because it was directed by Roger Corman, and it has a number of distinctive Corman touches. Likewise the movie features one of Paul Blaisdell's most ludicrous monster designs, which like many of his costumes looks pretty good on the posters but not a sharp on screen.

 Spoilers below.

The story is pretty simple. A ragamuffin collection of humans (all white) find their way into a valley after the nuclear destruction of the world. The valley has been spared immediate doom because of some geographical peculiarities, and proves to be a habitat that Jim Maddison (Paul Birch) and his daughter Louise (Lori Nelson) have chosen to ride out the end. Another man, the girl's boyfriend is supposed to join them, but doesn't make it. Those who do show up are  Tony Lamont  (Mike "Touch" Connors) and Ruby (Adele Jergens a real bombshell on the downside of a long career), a small time gangster and his stripper girlfriend. Also showing are gold prospector Pete (Raymond Hatton) and his donkey Diablo.  The final pair of survivors is made up of Rick (Richard Denning, as always earnest and dour) and Radek (Paul Dubov), the latter a man horribly mutated by the radiation which is seeps across the world, save for this pocket valley.

Rick very quickly assumes his role as hero-of-the-day, spouting Biblical musings and giving the jilted Louise someone to focus her attentions on. This gang survive, arguing in the house, amazingly untouched by the tumult beyond the valley, and in the neatly maintained yard, also amazingly untouched. They gambol in the local lake, which looks suspiciously like a set-decorated swimming pool, and they mostly pass the time while mutants roam the night killing and eating -- shock-- raw meat. Why this latter detail is so shocking escapes me, but its suggestion of uncivilized behavior strikes the folks as really really bad. There's quite a bit of talk about a nuclear test Jim witnessed which produced mutant animals, the same kind which seem to be prowling the night. The story tumbles along with Ruby going on about how she misses the stares of men on the stage and Tony wondering why he's not in charge. Then they begin to die and the story comes to a conclusion.

This isn't really a great movie by any means, but it does strangely have an effectively somber tone and a grim tale to relate, albeit at a very slovenly pace. When the marquee monster, a mutant who can communicate with Lori in some weird way, shows up the action picks up, but barely. I assume the mutant is supposed to be Lori's boyfriend who didn't make it, but this is never stated directly. The rains come, rains which promise destruction but the movie might have other plans.

It's worth a look.

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