Reviews
Terror from the Year 5000 (1958)
She hypnotizes her victims with her shiny new press on nails...WHAT??
This movie try's to frighten you and spook you and OH MY GOD..LOOK OUT FOR THOSE NAILS!! She hypnotizes her victims with her shiny new press on nails...WHAT?? It's just plain pretty bad, but I'd have to say again that it's so bad that it's...GOOD. There is one scene that brings a little chill when the psycho killer from the future is marching(?) through time and spewing this bizarre shriek that's..actually.. kind of spooky. But this is a short scene and soon you're back to some serious cheapness. It's the kind of 50's sci-fi cheapness that makes this film pass over the border from "just a bad movie" to "so bad it's good/funny/culty". If you want to know how I can say this see my review on "The Amazing Colossal Man".
Monster on the Campus (1958)
A couple of the scenes are so funny..I could die.
This film falls into my criteria of a cheap 50's sci-fi trying to be serious and in the process making you laugh at it's...cheapness. When you finally do get to see the monster it's a guy in an extremely cheap rubber mask moshing his mouth around. He's got hairy shoulderpads on that exude through his torn shirt. In one scene the monster gets so MAD after looking at a tape recorder and then a camera (why?) that it begins throwing things at them. It misses by 5 feet..even though it's standing only six feet away from them. It finds an axe and begins jumping around like a chimp with a new toy. Later it throws the axe in anger and nails a cop right between the eye's at 40 paces! I can split a gut laughing at this one. See also my review on "The Amazing Colossal Man".
The Amazing Colossal Man (1957)
A cheap horror movie that TRIES to be serious and frightening and yet comes off as laughable and so in my book it's.....GOOD?
When a sci-fi tries to be a spoof (ala "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes") it usually just comes of as a silly waste of time. But when the film is truly endeavouring to scare and amaze you and it STILL comes off as ..well..funny, then in my book it's a winner. This is the kind of film "The Amazing Colossal Man" is..almost. It's cheap special effects are to die for. You can see right through the giant guy most of the time. It's not so good...I mean bad...to get it to cult status, but give it 50 more years and it might. A cheap horror movie that TRIES to be serious and frightening and yet comes off as laughable and so in my book it's.....GOOD? This is the only kind of film I can use this kind of skewed logic on. This would not work, for instance, on a cheaply made badly acted old western. I don't know..I say somebody HAS to preserve this film to DVD so it doesn't disappear from all sight in the future. Just to show, if for no other reason, just how funny a truly bad fifties sci-fi can be. Please Note: This same review with slight editing will also work for, "Monster on the Campus", It..Came From Another Planet", "The Living Head", "The Crawling Eye", "The Attack of the Giant Leeches", "Terror From the Year 5000", ALL Ed Wood movies and...etc...etc...etc...
The Abominable Snowman (1957)
Rated G, no gore, no cheap tricks, but it both scared me and made me think.
This movie has a way of making you feel ashamed of feeling our race as superior to all other living things. Being made in the 50's it is frozen in time (well, a little pun) but can now still work as a period piece. There's nothing outdated about the way it's able to scare you though (if you place yourself in the characters shoes). There are no in-your-face, shocking, gory scenes like in so many modern fantasy movies and it uses the classic build of the lower budget 50's horror films. First the tracks, then the sounds, then the frightened natives, then a hand, an arm, a (maybe) glimps of the creature. But, it doesn't come off as a low budget film, because you're sucked into the story too much to notice. It works even today because the legend still lives. Nobody can really say even now if there are or are not Yeti roaming in the Himalayas. This movie begs to have a sequel, but only if it were done with the same spirit as the original. Today they might be too tempted to splash the screen with millions of dollars of special effects and computer graphics and LOSE the mystery and the tension. See it with an open mind. See it on a cold, snowy, blustery night with the lights all off.. while eating a.......(gasp)..Snow Cone!!