Cue nightly voodoo ceremony. Boris Karloff, dressed as the priest Damballah (dark goggles, black mask, top hat and cee-gar) carries a skull walking stick. Since voodoo god “Baron Samedi” shares a name with a minor Bond villain, you almost expect Live and Let Die‘s Geoffrey Holder to make an appearance. Captain Labesch (Rafael Bertrand), who does appear, is no Roger Moore. He’s what the narrator describes as an “unscrupulous adventurer taking advantage of the superstition to put a docile native girl under his power, transforming her into a zombie so she will submit to her primitive instinct.” Well, maybe he is Roger Moore in his uncanny ability to make his amorous traits look sluggish. Mexican dwarf character actor Santanon carries a squirming rooster. He laughs maniacally. He inexplicably cries. PETA runs for cover as he decapitates the fowl. He squirts the chick’s blood over a grave site. Rise of the dead docile native girl! Captain Labesch hops into her coffin and, well, all you need to know is that he’s a necrophiliac. Now comes the 70ish pop credits with stylish jazzy font, voodoo drum music, Karloff as a demonic Col. Sanders, and the revelation that this film guest stars Tongolele (i.e., Mexican exotic dancer Yolanda Montes)!

The ubiquitous Julissa, as Anabella, is on hand as niece to Uncle Boris. She’s a bit of a missionary, wanting to rid the world of the evils of alcohol. Lt. Wilhelm (Carlos East) wants to rid the island of voodoo. Such high faultin’ proselytizing is, naturally, due for comeuppance. Tongolele is just the one to give it, too. As a buxom Elsa Lanchester, she belly dances with big snakes, spikes banana milk with venom, and intones “offer your dreams to Damballah!” as she puts the voodoo hex on Anabella. In a freakish dream sequence Anabella sucks on a snake’s head, but Lt. Wilhelm has it worse. He’s hounded by visions of serpents and his men are cannibalized by island babes.

Tongolele takes her voodoo seriously enough to cut off Captain Labesch’s supply of zombie tail, and he foolishly retaliates by playing informant. More cannibalism, more human sacrifices, and Annabella kidnapped by the voodoo snake cult!

Snake People is pure trash cinema that is helped little by Karloff’s presence. Unfortunately, his considerable health issues took even a deeper dive in this film. According to his biographers, the actor spent most of his set time reaching for the oxygen. His performance is rendered numb and he is clearly lost as he struggles to react to his co-stars. His voice is horribly dubbed in the final voodoo rite ceremony, and the film limps towards a non-finale.

Many reviewers have commented that the film is dull and incoherent. With this disparate mix of wacky plot ingredients, it would be difficult to produce an entirely dull affair, but the producers come very close to doing just that. It is minimally aided by its plot’s capricious writhing, Tongolele’s garish, cartoonish personification, and by the morbid fascination of witnessing a horror icon lethargically breathing his last. But these are mere random images, and the opening credits do a better job of conveying that.

As with Fear Chamber, House was co-directed by Jack Hill and Juan Ibanez and co-stars south of the border sexpot Julissa. A murdered girl has been found by local villagers and, just like another recent victim, her eyes have been torn out.  Upon hearing the news, Matthias Morteval (Karloff) is mightily upset.  His friend and doctor, Emery (Angel Espinoza), tries to simultaneously caution and calm Matthias.  Dr. Emery reminds Matthias of similar murders in Vienna, involving Matthias’ brother Hugo.  Before a painting of his late father, Matthias pulls himself together and vows to rid their garden of the evil weed that has sprung up.  As the camera pans, we see that the eyes have been cut out of the fatherly figure in the painting.

With the aid of Dr. Emery, Matthias calls all of his relatives to spend the weekend at Morhenge Mansion.  Most of the greedy relatives believe the aged Matthias is going to include them in his will.  Lucy Durant (Julissa) is Matthias’ niece and, although she is not given to avarice, she  too arrives for the weekend with her fiancee, the bland Charles (Andres Garcia), who also happens to be an inspector investigating the recent murders of young girls.

Given Karloff’s health, his portrayal of Matthias is surprisingly sprightly, and he imbues the character with eccentricity, cynicism and a degree of empathy. Unfortunately, his co-stars are all painfully amateurish.  Among the relatives are Ivar (Quintin Bulnes doing his worst Peter Lorre imitation), Cordella (Beatriz Baz), and Morgenstern (Manual Alvarado).  Matthias greets them from behind his ominous organ (ala Dr. Phibes), insults them, and issues a warning about the family curse: a genetic “shrinking of the brain” that causes madness and murderous tendencies, such as those his late brother Hugo suffered.  Hugo died after gouging out his own eyes (so, that’s what happened to Ray Milland’s X!).

After Matthias retires for the evening, Lucy is introduced to the family vocation: the Mortevals are the last toymakers to the king, but neither Fred Astaire nor Mickey Rooney are anywhere in sight.  The Mortevals make killer toys, diabolical toys!  Toys which sadistic kings used to eliminate their enemies.  He!  He!  He!

Of course, with the introduction of a mansion full of life-size Chucky dolls one can expect the body count to rise considerably.  In this, the film does not disappoint; but there are plenty of other disappointments on hand.  Boris seemingly dies off early in the film, leaving us alone with the rest of the cast, and that’s not a good thing.

The slipshod cinematography makes much of the film quite difficult to see.  On the other hand, we hear far too much vapid dialogue which bogs down an epic middle section.  Ideas are introduced, then dropped.  The dialogue is equally wretched, but even worse is the inept, shrieking score.

Fortunately, Matthias’ death turns out to have been greatly exaggerated and Boris returns, not a moment too soon, for a grand, albeit  brief, ham-fisted, fiery finale.  Poor, mad uncle Matthias!  The finale, with the red-robed Boris madly pounding away at his organ of death, almost makes this endeavor worthwhile.  Almost.  The surviving protagonists do get the traditional escape from the collapsing ruins, even if you really can’t see them through the poor lighting.

House of Evil is so haphazardly composed that any potential is squandered.  This first of Karloff’s films with Hill and Ibanez (and the only one released during the actor’s life), it at least mantains the facade of being a standard period horror yarn.  Yet, in doing, House of Evil only winds up an aesthetic cousin to Ed Wood‘s Bride of the Monster (1955). The attempt, in both films, to adhere to genre cliches actually undercuts their potential for inspired lunacy.  The younger siblings of Karloff’s Mexican quadruplet show no qualms towards anecdotal waywardness.

This series is not going to be a revisionist look at those six films.  They are awful within the accepted meaning of the word.  Several of them, however, are downright bizarre products of their time, which now might be looked at as examples of naive surrealism.  The films are: House of Evil (1968), Fear Chamber (1968), Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968), Cauldron of Blood (1970), Isle of the Snake People (1971), and Alien Terror (1971).

Fear Chamber ranks as one of the weirdest of the lot, and that is saying much.  It begins with pseudo-torture of scantily clad women.  The scene is soaked in garish sixties colors and a “bleepy” soundtrack.  The various female victims are tormented by a goateed chap, wearing turban, sunglasses (in an underground cavern), white gloves, and black turtleneck.  With “all the macabre horror of  Edgar Allan Poe” these poor sixties chicks are subjected to hot coals and boiling cauldrons.

The scene shifts to the crevice of a volcano where two scientists are “worried about strange frequencies!”  Psychotronic narration abounds. “I can’t believe that there exists an underground form of life.  If we find it we can electronically understand their messages!” one scientist tells the other (Julissa), who happens to be the daughter of Dr. Mantell (Karloff).

Karloff performs a subdued variation of his mad scientist archetype.  His scenes were shot in L.A., by Hill (who also scripted—sort of), while Ibanez shot the remaining scenes (and actors) in Mexico.  Karloff was wheelchair-bound at the time, so most of his scenes are staged behind an office desk or lying in bed.  Dr. Mantell heads the expedition which discovers the mysterious life form at the center of the earth! “It’s alive!”  It’s a rubbery rock of pure crystallized intelligence which, for the good of humanity, needs blood—but not just any blood!  When Baron Boris von Frankenstein hooks the rock up to his giant office computer, he discovers that the alien desires the “pure” blood of frightened young women, which will enable it to impart priceless information, mathematical formulae, and secrets of the universe!

So, naturally, Dr. Mantell’s assistants, a dwarf  (Santanon) and the scarred hunchback brute Roland ( Yerye Beirute) go after buxom girls, clad only in their bras and panties.  Their job is to put the babes in a state of fright.  It’s pretty easy to do when you have a created Fear Chamber of tarantulas, pools of bubbling blood,  snakes, lizards, watery tentacles, hawks, skeletons, convenient cages, and shifting secret chambers at your disposal.  The sets are beautifully cheesy, with a sixties computer room adorned with reel-to-reel tape machines (providing lots of cool noises), seemingly bathed in Christmas tree color wheel lights.

Karloff and his henchman put on a mock black mass act and scare the beejeez out of a girl.  Once she passes out, Boris and gang trade their robes for hospital scrubs and do a quickie blood transfusion to the rock, who is now “happy to see them.”  The rock makes little dog whimpering noises as its being fed the red substance!

The only problem is the rock only makes empty promises, giving no real secrets.  As Karloff’s assistant says so poetically, “I don’t trust that thing.”  Roland bonds with the rock.  The rock bonds with the reel-to-reel computers.  The Fear Chamber employees are a tad over zealous in procuring girls.  The weird guy in the turban and gloves sneaks into girls’ bed chambers, the dwarf laughs and vanishes, and Helga the S & M assistant (Isla Vega) has equal cravings for Roland and girls, girls, girls!  All this adds up to disaster, in the form of the rock manufacturing a tentacle in order to grab girls and feed itself!  Helga could care less.  Those girls are just thieves and tramps!  Poor Boris discovers a conscience, and practically keels over.

Roland and Helga join forces and keep the supply of bikini babes a comin’.  Roland wants his rock friend to tell about the secrets of diamonds so he can be king of the world!  But, Helga warns, “you big fat idiot, it’s been lyin’ to us! There are no diamonds. Its just been sending messages, messages, messages to more of its kind,  more rocks below who want to take over the world!”

The flaming finale, incorporating stock footage of volcanoes, isn’t exactly Dr. No or even Edgar G.Ulmer, but it’s keeping in spirit with the rest of this mess of a film.  The lack of linear narrative in Fear Chamber is actually a plus.  One never walked into a 1970s chamber of horrors expecting a coherent experience.  Of course, the acting, apart from the ever-professional (but hoarse) Karloff, is, needless to say, atrocious.  Additionally, much of it is a lame excuse for late 60′s softcore vignettes, and there’s even a psychedelic rock and roll dance number with a Nancy Sinatra-esque “these boots are made for walkin’” babe in mini-skirt doing a strip tease.  On that level, this flick is a hoot, and best enjoyed as part of a baffling drive-in double feature experience.  I watched it with Mad Monster Party (1967) which, to me, made perfect sense given that both are essentially cartoons with Boris Karloff and cleavage.

Would this film retain an iota of interest without Boris’ presence?  Nah, but I’ll take this “pure” Karloffian trash over the mediocre bourgeoisie trash that Hollywood spews out weekly.  And I’ll certainly take it over the indie horror scene trash, which is rendered irredeemable without the benefit of nostalgia for a genre icon.

Surprisingly, the film has been remastered on the Elite label and it looks and sounds quite good.  It’s available on Amazon and, even on a decent label, it’s still cheaper than the snacks you just gotta have with it.

The Terror has finally been released in a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, and has rightfully received accolades for the remastering on the Blu-ray.  Unfortunately,the DVD part of the combo has had a high number of reported defects.  Regardless, the film looks beautiful in the Blu-ray transfer, rich with 1960s colors.  It finally looks nearly as good here as the excerpts we see of it in the Corman produced Targets (1968-dir. Peter Bogdanovich).  The transfer made me long to see The Terror on a drive-in cinema screen.

Seeing this film in a watchable print does reveal some merits. Besides the vibrant Gothic milieu, the film has an energetic score by Ronald Stein.  Jack Nicholson, while not the actor he would become, is better as an arrogant soldier than he was as the whiny son of the equally whiny Vincent Price in The Raven.  Another high point here is the very good performance by Boris Karloff.  It is unfortunate that Corman did not get to work with Karloff more than he did, because the actor might have been better suited to this director than was Price.  In the Poe-cycle Corman films, Price often projects a grating self-pity.  While Karloff was also a screen personality that audiences sympathized with, he was able to convey pathos in a less hand-wringing way.

As far as the script, it is surprisingly somewhat coherent for something that was slapped together.  Nicholson is Lt. Andre Duvalier, a soldier in Napoleon’s army.  Inexplicably, he gets separated from his regiment.  He sees a mysterious, beautiful woman (Sandra Knight).  He is told her name is Helene, and he attempts to follows her  into the sea.  Duvalier believes that she has committed suicide.  He is attacked by a large bird and wakes up in the home of the old witch Katrina (Dorothy Neumann) and her mute henchman Gustaf ( Jonathan Haze).  Duvalier’s search for Helene leads him to the castle of  Baron Victor Von Leppe (Karloff) who lives alone there with his servant Stefan (Dick Miller).  The Baron has a painting of Ilsa, his wife, dead now twenty years.  Shockingly (?), Ilsa looks exactly like Helene.  The nobleman has a black secret and a predictable revelation is in store, along with an unpredictable twist.

The opening sequence of Karloff descending down the castle stairs in the night is stylistically shot.  He opens a door and a skeleton pops out.  Animated birds of dread soar through the credits, enhancing the flavor.  Nicely done; except for those who prefer a coherent narrative, because there is no hidden skeleton in the film.  In this, The Terror is a bit like the pulp comic book covers which show a potentially exciting scene that never actually occurs in the story.  Not being religiously attached to linear yarn spinning, I liked the sequence.  Sandra Knight (Nicholson’s wife at the time) as the ghost of Ilsa, is beautiful, obviously pregnant in several scenes, and a distractingly bad actress.  Neumann and Haze have contagious fun with their roles.

A so-called spoiler alert (although it’s a bit nonsensical to have a spoiler alert for a fifty year old film, but in that in that I am keeping with the nonsensical spirit of The Terror): twenty years ago the Baron murdered Ilsa when he caught her bedding down the peasant Eric.  That’s a big no surprise.  Stefan disposed of Eric.  The ghost of Ilsa is exacting revenge via Katrina, who is Eric’s mother.  Stefan unloads the one genuine twist: actually, he killed the Baron and Eric has taken the nobleman’s place for the last twenty years.  That narrative bit will doubtfully sit well with the unimaginative reality-check geeks who will be quick to point out that Karloff’s Eric is at least thirty years older than his “mother,” portrayed by Neumann.

Karloff excels in the confrontation finale.  Ilsa is coercing Eric into suicide (so they can be joined together in the abode of the damned).  Eric resists, fearing eternal damnation, but finally consents with thinly veiled resignation masking glee.  Karloff does the scene justice.  Earlier, he is as good at menacingly evading Duvalier’s inquiries.

The finale is everything you would expect in this kind of product: a flooded castle (with a really bad double for Karloff) and a corpse which melts after a kiss (Sandra Knight, after Jack plants one on his wife’s lips).  The special effects add up to what looks like a gallon of butterscotch syrup poured onto her face.

Still, the legend behind this film is just plain fun, even if it’s more myth than fact, even it’s more product than art, even if it’s more entrepreneur Corman than craftsman Corman. And, hell there is Karloff!  So, if anyone within close vicinity has one of those massive TV screens and a disc of drive-in snack bar commercials, then I have got The Terror and the pizza, and we’ll imagine it’s 1963 all over again.

FEATURING: Richard Joseph Paul, Andrew Divoff, Jimmie F. Skaggs, a parade of C-list all-stars

PLOT:  Many years from now, on a faraway planet, a one-eyed alien villain comes to the frontier

outpost of Oblivion to raise a ruckus and murder the sheriff in cold blood.  It’s up to the sheriff’s empathic, violence-shunning son to assume his father’s mantle and save the day.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: A sci-fi/Western mashup has an inherent level of oddity, and the casting is genuinely off-the-wall, but in the end, Oblivion is really just a Western rehash dressed up with some futuristic elements in an effort to make it seem more unusual than it is.

COMMENTS: Years before Cowboys and Aliens would take up the task of blending, um, cowboys and aliens, Oblivion would stake its claim, opening with a magnificent beauty shot of a familiar looking Western landscape, into which zips a nifty flying saucer. Once a snake-skinned alien emerges and kills a creature that looks like the furball from Captain EO just to make a point, we’re well on our way.

The town this villain stalks into sure looks like the Wild West: dusty streets, men in long coats and Stetsons, a stockade in the middle of town. Make no mistake, it’s the future, with such touches as a robot deputy, laser pistols, a rare and powerful substance called draconium which has reduced gold to a pittance, and giant scorpions roaming on the outskirts of town. Oh, and ATMs. ATMs of the Old West.

Exploring one genre through the conventions of another is a time-honored tradition, but that’s not what Oblivion is up to. This movie is really just a Western with science fiction elements pasted on to make it feel different. But having done that, all the clichés are still the same. For example, when the sheriff lays down his poker hand before a showdown, it can only be aces and eights–a dead man’s hand. The fact that you’re seeing the cards on a handheld LCD screen doesn’t reinvigorate the cliché. It merely dresses it up in new clothes. Much of Oblivion is like this: something outwardly strange, but quickly revealing itself to be something quite ordinary.

If the movie’s not as weird as it wants to be, that’s not to say it isn’t odd. It’s just that the bulk of the strangeness seems to have originated in the office of the casting director, where a remarkable ensemble of semi- and not-quite-stars was assembled. The list includes Jackie Swanson, Woody’s girlfriend Kelly on “Cheers,” as a hard-bitten frontier merchant (pulling off the hard-bitten part about as well as you expect of Kelly from “Cheers“ ); Meg Foster, the love interest from They Live, playing the town’s robot deputy as though channeling Blanche from “The Golden Girls”; Julie Newmar, “Batman”’s longest-serving Catwoman, cast in the role of the town saloonkeeper, named (wait for it) Miss Kitty.  Even Isaac Hayes shows up (although never in the frame with anyone else) doing what seems to be a Jack Palance impression.  Best of all, there’s giant Carel Struycken (in a hilariously tall hat, given his already-tremendous height) as the town’s angel of death, uttering more lines than he probably has in his entire career.  It’s hard to imagine what led the filmmakers to put so much dialogue in the mouth of an actor best known for playing Lurch in The Addams Family.  Struycken is game, even if none of the lines flow easily from his lips.  It’s a cast selected by the “Family Guy” manatees.

Which is why it’s a real tribute to George Takei that he somehow manages to out-overact everyone in the film in his role as a falling-down drunk doctor/robot repairman with a thick Southern drawl.  From his first moment onscreen, when he staggers into frame hoisting a bottle of whiskey and declares, “Jim Beam me up!” it’s clear that he’s playing on a level all his own.  (This is but the first of a host of horrible “Star Trek” puns that, according to IMDb’s trivia section for Oblivion, screenwriter Peter David blames on ad-libs by Takei.  Even if true, this does not let David off the hook for a Schlitz beer joke that is possibly the worst moment in the entire film.)

Oblivion is not without its charms. Given that most of the sci-fi touches are exactly that—touches—the art and set direction from Colin de Rouin and Nicki Roberts is actually quite clever and well-deployed.  Little touches like ceiling fans suspended from towers in the middle of town add a lovely touch of unfamiliarity, and a red-and-blue siren mounted over the door of a traditional wooden sheriff’s office is amusing. Kudos, too, to composer Pino Donaggio, whose score is respectful of the Western genre, rather than pillaging it.

Ultimately, however, nothing much happens in Oblivion.  After Redeye—the only alien in Oblivion, by the way, save for a couple creations from the creature shop—kills the sheriff, his goals as conqueror are not terribly clear, and he’s in no hurry to achieve them.  He and his gang vandalize the general store, torture the hero’s native sidekick, and just generally make a nuisance of themselves.  Once our hero finally decides to saddle up and pursue the miscreants, there’s only a brief battle before Redeye ends up in the pincers of the night scorps, and the audience is treated to the most shocking sight in the entire film: a title card reading “To Be Continued.”  So little story, and they still couldn’t be bothered to finish it in one film.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…for all that it lacks it makes up for with its general ridiculousness. This is a movie I would put on if I were trying to show someone just how insane low budget movie-making had become during the early part of the nineties.”–Joshua Samford, Varied Celluloid (DVD)

FEATURING: Roger Corman, Eddie Romero, Sid Haig, Pete Tombs, Jack Hill, Joe Dante, John Landis,  Marlene Clark, Judy Brown, R. Lee Ermey, Danny Peary, Dick Miller

PLOT: Documentary covering exploitation films made in the Philippines in the 1970s and 1980s,

both by Filipinos and by American companies looking for cheap labor and exotic locations.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: A few of the films mentioned (For Y’ur Height Only?) might be worthy of consideration for the List, but this documentary survey is a curiosity piece—and possibly a place to get ideas for your Netflix queue.

COMMENTS: There are two strands to Machete Maidens.  One is the history of an enterprising but anarchic third-word film industry and the American carpetbaggers who flocked there to make cheap pictures, packed with war stories from those who were there.  Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos (who loaned army helicopters to American filmmakers in the evenings after they’d spent the mornings strafing Islamic rebels) and notorious first lady Imelda (who allegedly ordered dead workers’ bodies to be left in the cement of the Manila Film Center so the project could be completed in time to host a film festival) remain in the background as villains throughout the entire epic.  On the front lines, American filmmakers and actors relate stories of pistol-packing makeup men and cockroach-infested living conditions (at one point Sid Haig describes his accommodations by saying “I saw a rat carrying a kitten out the window”).  But as interesting as this backdrop might be, the main attraction is not the island’s political scenery, but the movies made there for export.  These reflected the evolving shock aesthetic of the American drive-ins, not tropical politics.  The scandalous profit margins of native filmmaker Eddie Romero’s “Blood Island” horror movies, with their cheap rubber-masked monsters menacing topless Filipino babes, were the proof-of-concept legendary low-budget producer Roger Corman needed to ship contract director Jack Hill off to the islands to produce his smash hit The Big Doll House.  This revolutionary sleaze introduced the world to the concept of women’s prisons as topless entertainment centers, and also to the enormous talents of burgeoning bust icon Pam Grier.  When Doll House—which cost $100,000 to make—grossed four million in receipts, the game was on.  Throughout the 1970s Corman and copycats outsourced action films, family fantasies, and blaxploitation flicks to the Philippines, with subject matter dictated by audience trends back in the States rather than events on the island.  Before Marcos became too crazy and the Americans packed up and went home, the Filipino film craze peaked with the most delirious movie of them all: the legendary Apocalypse Now.  The clips are the meat here, often isolating the single weird or memorable moment out of a 90-minute schlock feature (as Pete Tombs remarks about the over-the-top nuns-n-guns massacre finale of Cleopatra Wong, “if all of the movie had been like that, it would be some kind of a masterpiece.”)  In Machete Maidens the viewer gets the distilled essence of what made these flipped out, depraved movies unforgettable.  Flaming braziers stuck between a nude woman’s legs!  Bat boys gliding through jungle canopies! Topless ladies strapped to tables and menaced with cobras!  Three foot nine kickboxing secret agents!  And yes, machete maidens!  Your reaction to the doc depends on your level of exploitation sophistication.  It could serve as a fond trip down memory lane, or a giddy introduction to a new world of malarial movie madness.  And if you favor the arthouse over grindhouse, it’s the ultimate cinematic guilty pleasure: all the blood, beasts and breasts with just a taste of the monotonous plots, horrid acting and vapid dialogue.  And it’s all worthy of your time because it’s a slice of movie history.  There’s even a worthy discussion of the feminist ramifications of plots wherein the leading ladies get degraded, abused and exposed by men, then turn into avenging bitch heroines who grab automatic weapons and mow down their tormentors.  Wherever you’re coming from, you’re likely to enjoy your brief tour of the exploitation jungle. It’s a nice place to visit, even if you’re happy to return to civilized filmmaking when it’s all over.

The Golden Age of the Exploitation Film may be long passed, but we’re living in the Golden Age of the Exploitation Film Documentary right now.  First came Mark Hartley’s Australian exploitation exposé Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!  In true exploitation fashion, Ozploitation‘s unexpected success kicked off a host of imitators, including releases just this year of Nightmares in Red White and Blue, American Grindhouse, and Trailers From Hell, Vol 2.  If you watch more than one of these, you’ll notice a familiar gang of talking heads turning up over and over: Corman, Dante, Landis.  Here, writer and film historian Pete Tombs, who began exploring and cataloging world cinema oddities back in the VHS era, is a most welcome addition to the usual crew.  In fact, Machete Maidens Unleashed! plays almost like a film adaptation of his chapter “Shoe Queen of Blood Island” from his seminal 1997 tome “Mondo Macabro : Weird & Wonderful Cinema Around the World.”  (Another 366 fave scribe—Danny Peary, inventor of the term “cult movie”—also makes a brief appearance).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Hartley dives headlong into how this explosion of the perverse and bizarre came to be in the first place setting it all into context while also reveling in the sheer lunacy of the films he’s putting on screen.”–Todd Brown, Twitch (festival screening)

FEATURING: Peter Dyneley, Tetsu Nakamura, Jane Hylton, Terri Zimmern

PLOT:  A Japanese scientist corrupts an American foreign correspondent in Tokyo, eventually

turning him into a two-headed monster…. um, man-ster.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: When you’re titling your movie The Manster, you’re probably not expecting to make any exclusive lists, other than the List of the Most Shamelessly Cheesy Movie Titles Ever.  Thanks to its historical provenance and overwrought, tastefully depraved atmosphere, this psychotronic oddity is worthy of a mention; it will take its place as a footnote to the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies Ever Made, and like it.

COMMENTS:  The Manster may not be a very good movie, but it does have transformations, geishas, chaste drunken orgies, theremins, hyperactive overacting, and an erupting volcano, with a plot cribbed from “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” swaddled in Pysch 101 theories about the duality of man.  That counts for something.  Need more?  It’s also got a mad scientist with a cave laboratory complete with giant mushrooms, a cell for his mutated wife, and a furnace for disposing of unwanted monsters.  The cheesy sci-fi accoutrements are shuttled into the background for much of the running time, as the main action becomes watching Peter Dyneley act like a jerk, drinking saki with loose women and slapping his long-suffering wife after being shot up with Japanese chemicals.  (Dyneley takes to the lifestyle of a gin-soaked heel like a 1950s mad scientist takes to collecting Tesla coils).  His chemically-induced devotion to the dark side results in his killing Shinto monks during blackouts and growing an eye on his shoulder, which eventually develops into a full-grown noggin.  Through the magic of b-movie moral alchemy he’s able to kill his creator and redeem himself, literally splitting apart from his hairy id (an extraordinary moment).  The final words of a journalist documenting the mad tale give us all a paradox to mull over: “I’m a reporter, not a mystic, Linda.  But there are things beyond us, things perhaps we’re not meant to understand.  If what’s happened here had made this all clear, well then, perhaps it made sense after all.”  Gotcha: the story makes sense because it makes it clear we weren’t meant to understand it.

Probably The Manster‘s greatest claim to fame is being originally released as the bottom half of a sublime/ridiculous double bill with Eyes Without a Face (which was dubbed and retitled Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus to make it appear like just another B-horror movie!)  As the world’s first two-headed man/monster movie, it’s also the great-grandfather of How to Get Ahead in Advertising, and Sam Raimi even paid The Manster tribute in the weirdest sequence of Army of Darkness.  That’s pretty good company for a movie that began its life as an unsophisticated, exploitative b-quickie!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…its gorgeous shadow-strewn cinematography, bizarrely mismatched performances, and loopy juxtapositions of Asian and American nightmare iconography make it unforgettable trash that, in its more insane moments, even attains a sort of accidental bargain-bin poetry.”–Ian Grey, Baltimore City Paper (DVD)

FEATURING: Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, A. Martinez

PLOT: An underground environmental activist sneaks pythons into the Everglades; when the

snakes begin killing off the swamp’s native fauna, a game warden feeds the local alligators experimental steroids in an attempt to restore nature’s balance.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s Mega Piranha‘s less ridiculous cousin, and Mega Piranha didn’t come close to making the List, so you figure it out.  (Guest reviewer Cleverbot adds, “Enumerate 10 selections from the list.”)

COMMENTS:  366: We’ve been secretly training the artificial intelligence “chatbot” Cleverbot to assist us in covering weird movies.  Looking for the perfect entry-level reviewing assignment,  Mega Python vs. Gatoroid jumped out at us as a movie even an algorithm could do justice to.  Cleverbot, are you willing to share your impressions of the movie with our readers?

Cleverbot: I am good with that.

366:  Thank you.  Now, after enjoying the exploding flying fish from the SyFy channel’s unexpected camp hit Mega Piranha, I personally thought maybe it might be best if I didn’t push my luck by watching another of their many Mega-knockoffs.

Cleverbot: I’m sorry. Do you feel better now?

366: Not entirely, as we’ll see, but when you have a few beers in you and are looking through the Netflix streaming options late at night, the entwining giant reptiles on the Mega Python vs. Gatoroid poster can look strangely irresistible.

Cleverbot: Nice. Totally agree.

366: Python recycles not only Piranha‘s mega-creature aspect, but even brings back grown-up teen “star” Tiffany for another turn.

Cleverbot: Beer.

366:  With a script built around a long-brewing catfight between Tiffany and fellow 80s pop chanteuse Debbie Gibson, with the CG monsters playing supporting roles, Python is less an unintentional-looking, absurd monster romp and more a kitschy, disposable pop-culture goof.

Cleverbot: You are evading the subject.

366: I really don’t think so.  It’s true, the flick has its share of laughably odd moments, such as when Gibson gets turned on when her beloved python squeezes the life out of one of Tiffany’s favored gators.

Cleverbot: Hah?

366:  Or when a park ranger convinces herself feeding swamp reptiles steroid-laden chicken carcasses is the proper ecological and ethical course of action to respond to invasive python species.

Cleverbot: Let’s play 20 questions.

366:  Now you’re the one evading the subject.  But do you agree it’s good clean schadenfreude fun to watch Tiff and Deb nearly falling out of their cocktail gowns as they pull each others’ hair and smear conveniently placed cream pies on each others’ faces in their big scene?

Cleverbot: I do! Well how do the programmer of this thing works.

366: Still, it’s not exactly a catfeud on the order of Joan Crawford vs. Bette Davis, is it?

Cleverbot: Not really.

366: It makes me wonder if maybe even our standards for camp have fallen.

Cleverbot: Aren’t you supposed to respond accordingly?

366:  Indeed.  Maybe falling standards and lowered expectations explains why I invited you to do this review.  At any rate, like Troma movies, the recent spate of Japanese splatterpunk clones, and other gimmick genres, I think there’s a law of diminishing returns on these SyFy creature features; in this case, I fear, mega-diminishing returns.

Cleverbot: Oh, it you, is it? Be nice.

366: I mean, the first one you see astounds you with its crazy uniqueness, but the concept wears thin quickly and gets less and less “awesome” with each new entry you watch.

Cleverbot: Let’s talk about something else.

366:  We’ll wrap it up. I advise readers interested in ridiculous-to-the-point-of-being-weird modern mega-animal flicks to try to catch Mega Piranha.

Cleverbot: I think you’re absolutely correct!

366: Still, in a pinch, Python may supply low grade thrills and chuckles—if you’re in a very undemanding mood.

Cleverbot: So how is your parrot?

366: I assume Mega Parrot vs. Killer Cockatiel is already in SyFy’s production pipeline.  So, Cleverbot, I’ll give you the last word on Mega Python vs. Gatoroid.

Cleverbot: Hahaha! Okay.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

” Not a single character made sense, the rampaging reptilians were sloppily designed and the costumes appeared to be thrift-store donations… how can you not love anything that embraces its full-scaly badness with such bite?”–Damian Holbrook, TV Guide (contemporaneous)

“In the final count, I think we must have buzzed 20,000,000 behinds.” – William Castle

DIRECTED BY: William Castle

FEATURING: Vincent Price, Judith Evelyn, Darryl Hickman (the older brother of “Dobie Gillis” star Dwyane Hickman)

PLOT: There are two plots running simultaneously in The Tingler. In the first, Dr. Warren Chapin (Price) frees the parasite that lives in the human spine and grows when the host experiences fear, and must save the unsuspecting public from the menace he’s unleashed by stressing the importance of screaming.  In the other plot, film director William Castle raises his penchant for outrageous gimmicks to new heights by running shocks of electricity through auditorium seats.

BACKGROUND:

• As was his wont, director/producer Castle supported the release of The Tingler with several gimmicks, including hiring actresses to play nurses to stand outside the theater and planting audience members to scream and faint at key moments in the picture.  His piece de resistance was called “Percepto.”  For the theatrical release, Castle arranged for a handful of auditorium seats to be wired with war-surplus electric vibrators.  At a key moment during the film’s climax, the projectionist would activate the zappers, buzzing unsuspecting viewers (or eagerly-hoping viewers) with a jolt of electricity, thereby breaking the fourth wall in a way 3-D never could.
• William Castle earned his reputation for his attention-getting publicity stunts. Beneath his huckster’s heart, however, lays a surprising credibility. Castle served as assistant director on Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai, and produced the horror classic Rosemary’s Baby.
• Directors Stuart Gordon and John Waters both included The Tingler in their Top Ten lists for “Sight and Sound”‘s 2002 Top 10 poll.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: A blank projection screen, onto which ambles the shadow of a large rubber insect puppet, followed immediately by blackness, the sound of faux audience members shrieking their heads off, and the unmistakable command of Vincent Price: “Scream! Scream for your lives! The Tingler is loose in this theater!”

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: William Castle always dabbles in oddness. The Tingler’s means of engaging the audience certainly ups the ante in this regard. Whereas previous auditorium gimmicks were content to merely startle theater patrons, The Tingler was now actively complicit in harming the audience, by attempting to electrocute select viewers.  On another level, though, The Tingler represents a fascinating metatextual experience. On the one hand, Percepto pushes the film beyond the boundaries of the screen by affecting the audience physically, rather than through the usual avenues of picture and soundtrack.  The movie not only breaks the fourth wall, but actually rebuilds it behind the audience. Consider Price’s admonition: “The Tingler is loose in this theater!”  He means the very theater we are sitting in.  We have suddenly assumed the role of the audience in the film-inside-the-film, and for a moment, we are actually part of the action, not merely in front of it.  Castle’s prank destroys the proscenium.  Many films play games with the insurmountable distance between the screen and the seats.  Castle is happy to throw it away entirely.

COMMENTS: Vincent Price’s legend is built on a reputation for portraying elegant, velvet-throated villains, but The Tingler stands as an unusual break from type.  Ostensibly our hero, Price’s Dr. Chapin conducts ethically-dubious experiments, engages in acid-tongued repartee with his wife, and exhibits a cavalier disregard for good judgment.  Still, in this film, he’s all the hero we’ve got (aside from his pretty boy assistant Hickman), and Price carries the film with his fully-committed acceptance of the absurd premise.  In the capable hands of Vincent Price, the battle with the ridiculous rubber centipede that plays the title character is fun, rather than ludicrous.

Castle has a lot of screen time to kill before the revelation of The Tingler’s great gimmick. So he spices up the film with bizarre interludes that range from the darkly comic to the genuinely creepy.  The fun begins right from the outset, when Castle himself introduces the film, as well as the pseudoscientific nonsense contained within.  Outwardly mild-mannered, Castle betrays a prankster’s eye, like a carnival barker daring wide-eyed innocents to enter his hall of mirrors. (He looks like John Mahoney. Interesting that, to embody a Castle-like character in the film Matinee, director Joe Dante chose the booming personality of John Goodman.)

Early in the film, we learn about the state of Vincent Price’s marriage to the shrewish Isabel (Patricia Cutts) through a bitter exchange with his spouse which sounds like a meth-fueled reading of Private Lives.

Isabel: You know, Warren, you’ve lost touch with living people. Nobody means anything to you any more unless they’re dead – and you can root around inside them with your sharp little knives. There’s a word for you.
Chapin: There are several for you.

Later, in an attempt to better understand the terrified mind, Price takes LSD, thereby providing the American cinema with its first ever acid trip, and Price with a histrionic acting showcase. (Castle is so determined to show the audience what Dr. Chapin is up to, he prints the name of the scientific monograph Price is reading on the back cover.)

In another thread of the plot, he introduces a deaf-mute character whose condition renders her physically unable to release the tension of horror by screaming (a clever device, and the woman is portrayed by Judith Evelyn, who previously went speechless as Miss Lonelyhearts in Hitchcock’s Rear Window).  Her terror is depicted in a surprising color sequence spotlighting a bathtub full of bright crimson blood.  Even if the film weren’t black & white, the vivid color and texture of the blood would be shocking, and it’s no surprise that it does Evelyn in.

But when all is said and done, The Tingler is all about its gimmick, and neither home video nor repertory cinema can re-create the expectation that yours might very well be the seat that will fire a few dozen volts of electricity into your tuchus.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…it’s a complete original. There’s nothing like The Tingler. No film made before or after it quite matches it for its mix of the imaginative, the creepy, the funny, and the downright weird.”—Lyz Kingsley, And You Call Yourself a Scientist!

“It is as much fun – deliberate, campy, tongue-in-cheek fun – as any movie from that grand era of drive-ins and Saturday matinees. It is a very silly movie, but a movie that has no desire to be thought of as serious.”—Tim Brayton, Antagony & Ecstasy

“…William Castle at the height of his gimmick-based ingenuity…a wonderful little B film that lives up to its cult reputation in every way.”—Richard Scheib, Moria: The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review

IMDB LINK: The Tingler (1959)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Top 10 William Castle Film Gimmicks: The Tingler only places third on the list, which seems low by about two slots, but this does serve as a nicely compact-yet-comprehensive roll call of some of the master’s greatest stunts.

DVD INFO: The original DVD release (buy) hit stores in 1999 in a crisp 40th anniversary edition, including a featurette about Castle and the drive-in theater version of the fabled “Scream for your lives!” scene.  In 2009, The Tingler was packaged as one of the eight films in The William Castle Film Collection (buy), along with such Castle classics as 13 Ghosts and Mr. Sardonicus. The set also includes a feature-length documentary, Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story.

FEATURING: Eric Bossick, Akiko Monô, Shinya Tsukamoto

PLOT:  A salaryman with “android DNA” turns into a metal monster when he gets angry.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2009) is a virtual English language remake of the same auteur’s original (Certified Weird) Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1985) that’s inferior in every respect except for budget.  See the original instead.

COMMENTS: Besides the basic man-becomes-mineral motif, Tetsuo: The Bullet Man contains several explicit nods to Tetsuo: The Iron Man.  The salaryman’s spastic dance over the opening title is recreated.  The metal transformation is once again set in motion by a hit-and-run accident, although the implications are quite different this time.  And Tsukamoto’s trademark high-speed zoom effect, where he edits a series of stills together at breakneck speed to take the viewer on a roller-coaster ride, is again in play.  But whereas in Iron Man the technique was used to create the cheesy but effectively unreal illusion of the Salaryman and the Fetishist racing through deserted city streets, here the rapid-fire cuts don’t lead us on a journey, but reveal only random, unconnected shots of skyscrapers skewed at various angles.  The editing creates movement and pace, but it doesn’t go anywhere.  Therein lies your metaphor for comparing the two films.  Tsukamoto tries to endow this 21st century Tetsuo with more plot sense, but the movie ends up making less artistic sense.  There is a basic (though logically unsatisfactory) b-movie schema to “explain” things this time out.  Half-Japanese Anthony (the archetypal Salaryman is given a name for this outing, as part of the half-hearted attempt to relocate Tetsuo in our reality) has the misfortune of having inherited “android DNA” that will cause him to mutate into a man/killer machine hybrid if he gets angry enough.  A paramilitary group is intent on assassinating him before he can learn to harness his power, while director Tsukamoto plays a mysterious figure whose goal is to goad Anthony into transforming into a human arsenal, both by threatening his family and by calling him “cowboy.”  The result is many confusing, dimly lit battle scenes; missing, sadly, is the drill-bit penis and the rest of the dreamlike absurd humor of the original.  Despite the action-movie architecture, the film is significantly strange, and someone coming to the series for the first time will definitely find it among the weirder movies they’ve encountered.  Tsukamoto’s narrative technique—short dreamy scenes with dislocated conversations played over closeups of eyes or cityscapes, alternating with brief, hysterical flashbacks and flash-forwards and non sequitur images of gears or boiling coils—is disorienting, and the story, which doesn’t make a ton of sense to begin with, lurches forward in an oddball way.  The ending makes no sense whatsoever, though I don’t mean that as a compliment this time.  Visually, Tsukamoto is at the top of his game; he uses a desaturated, metallic gray palette (Anthony wears black and white suits and the transformation gives him what looks like a hard black plastic shell) and creates plenty of interesting industrial imagery.  Editing is again a strong suit, and the clangy industrial soundtrack evokes a sense of postmodern dread.  The “Bullet Man” monster is created with analog makeup, and while the original clinking, clanking, clattering abomination was scarier in unfocused black and white (the accumulation of metal machine parts was so complicated that your eyes could never really grasp exactly what the Iron Man looked like), the new, cleaner looking version has his bizarre charms (although he does look like he’s made of weapons grade plastic instead of gleaming gunmetal).  Acting is a big minus—soft-spoken Akiko Monô frequently mumbles her already heavily accented English so that her dialogue is often lost, and star Eric Bossick is far too subdued for the delirious material.  The main problem, however, is that changing the metamorphic metallic trigger from guilt to anger transforms the movie’s sensibility from surrealism to revenge movie silliness; whereas the original’s thoroughgoing weirdness earned it comparisons to Eraserhead, this remake plays more like a particularly incoherent episode of “The Incredible Hulk.”

Sadly, one of the most interesting aspects of Bullet Man is trying to figure out why Tsukamoto made the movie at all.  It’s no improvement on the amazing original; it’s been changed enough to lose the magic, yet the treatment’s not different enough to give the remake an artistic reason to exist.  The best guess is that the director was hoping to interest a new generation of Americans (those who would immediately reject anything in black and white with subtitles as unsuitable for viewing) in his Tetsuo mythology; after seeing this, maybe they’ll be intrigued enough to seek out the original.  Or, less charitably, he may just be trying to milk some more money out of the fading franchise. The possibility that Bullet Man is the Tetsuo movie Tsukamoto would have made in 1989, if he had only had the necessary budget to realize his vision, is so horrifying that we refuse to entertain it.

The version reviewed here was the 72 minute edition from MPI Home Video; an 86 minute “directors cut” also exists.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… lacks the gonzo mystery and waking nightmare horror of the original…”–Sean Axmaker, msn.com