The Giant Claw (1957) = Enact With Gal

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

There are a lot of really bad movies out there.  When I hear that a movie is bad, I will sometimes take it as a challenge to watch it, if only to see how bad it is.  While looking at a Web Site dedicated to bad movies, I came across The Giant Claw.

I immediately went to NetFlix to put the movie on my queue.  The movie came bundled with another movie called The Creature with the Atom Brain and had no special features.  It was just the two movies and an episode of some TV show I had never heard of.

The movie is pretty simple by today’s standards.  Mitchell MacAfee is an engineer that’s testing planes for the military.  On a test run, he spots some UFO that he describes as being the size of a battleship.  When pilots are sent out, they see nothing.  There isn’t even anything on radar and radar picks up everything.   Not only that, but one of the pilots doesn’t return.  No one believes Mr. MacAfee until a commercial plane reports seeing a similar UFO…right before they disappear.

Suddenly, every one is mobilized to fight this terror.  Several more incidents underscore the need to stop this thing, which looks like a giant version of the funny-looking, awkwardly handled marionette that it is.  (Add to that the bad special effects and you have something truly laughable.)

Nothing works on it.  Bullets bounce off of it.  Missiles explode with no effect.  The Bird From We Know Not Where continues to eat people with impunity.  Eventually, someone figures out that the bird has some sort of antimatter shielding.  You’re probably thinking back to your high-school science class and wondering if this is the same antimatter that annihilates normal matter.  Yes, it is.  However, in the movie, using antimatter as shielding apparently doesn’t cause it to explode.

Eventually, Mr. MacAfee finds a way to penetrate the shielding and bring the bird down.  He has some sort of scientific explanation that we’re just supposed to accept, even though narration states that the particle he wants to use lasts only a few moments.  Why, of course that will work!  Mr. MacAfee saves the day!

Can you tell how much I want to tear this movie apart?

First, the bird is a joke.  When we first ‘see’ the bird, it’s just a blur on the screen.  This is apparently to indicate that no one has gotten a good look at the thing.  When we do get a good look at it, you have to try to ignore the strings.  When the bird approaches a plane to eat the person, the bird gets just close enough that it starts to blur.  Then, the movie cuts to a shot of the bird chasing a really small toy to give the effect of its size.

Also, it’s pointed out in the movie that the bird never seems to land.  It’s always seen flying, even though it must rest.  An egg is found, implying that the bird must have come down long enough to lay it.  There’s no mention of a Mr. Giant Marionette Bird or of there are other eggs elsewhere in the world.  Also, MacAfee is able to destroy the egg, which means that it has no shielding.  If the bird is antimatter, wouldn’t it stand to reason that the egg is antimatter as well?

There’s also no talk of where the bird came from or if there are more.  I can let this one pass since the immediate concern should be getting rid of the one at hand.  However, consider that the nearest star to us is about four light years away.  Did the bird just fly here on its own or is there a spacecraft?  The bird seems at least someone intelligent.  It has shielding and it employs a spiral search pattern.  I doubt any species capable of coming to Earth, defending itself and showing some signs of intelligence wouldn’t bring at least a few friends with it.

There are other plot holes used to advance the story.  For instance, MacAfee and his mathematician girlfriend, Sally Caldwell, are about to leave to help deal with the bird when they hear a radio announcement.  Air travel had been suspended for a few days.  Now, road travel has been suspended except in emergencies.  They look out the window and see the bird, but decide to drive to the airport anyway.  That seems like a really smart plan.

You have to see this movie to know just how bad it is.  Do not buy or otherwise spend money on this movie.  I’ve noticed that the movie is currently sold bundled with other movies, and for a good reason.  I think most people that have seen the movie know better than to buy it.  Might as well get you to buy it with something else.  How else will the studio make money off of it? 

IMDb page

 

The Phantom Planet (1961)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

Warning:  I’m going to be giving away a lot of details in this review.  If you don’t want to know every last detail, you might want to stop reading now.



In the future, it always seems like we have some sort of space travel.  In some cases, we’ve explored the galaxy.  In others, we’re just starting out.  In the Phantom Planet, the year is 1980 and the United States Air Force has a lunar base and is sending out people to have a look around.  When several ships go missing, the commanding officer pulls Capt. Frank Chapman off the Mars mission to go out looking for answers.

He and his navigator, Lt. Ray Makonnen, follow the flight plan exactly, but Chapman has a feeling that sticking to the exact course won’t do anything.  So, they deviate and are promptly hit by a meteor shower.  When they go out to fix the damage, they don’t use any sort of tether. Makonnen is able to save Chapman, but pays the ultimate price when he’s sent drifting off into space.

Due to an oxygen leak, Chapman passes out.  He awakens to find Makonnen gone and the ship being pulled into a large asteroid.  He makes a recording for posterity as he lands on the surface.  After crashing, he passes out only to awaken to some really small people.  We’re talking smaller than his helmet people.  After breathing in their air, Chapman shrinks to their size.

In an effort to defend himself, Chapman assaults one of the people.  He’s tried and convicted only to be handed down the horrible sentence of being able to walk freely among the native population.  He’s told that he can’t go back.  When he presses the issue, he’s told that his spacecraft has been sent off into space.

Rhetton is the name of the planet and the people of Rhetton are very advanced compared to Earth.  The reason they’re so small is that the atoms in their world have electrons with tighter orbits, meaning that everything is more compressed.  (I think this is supposed to explain why Chapman appears to shed so much mass.)  They have the ability to control gravity, which lets them move the planet around at will.  They also have the ability to synthesize food, which explains how they can live on a barren planet.  (It doesn’t explain how they evolved there, though.)

Chapman is given the choice of two women to marry.  Both Zetha and Liara are attractive women.  Zetha, however, is mute.  Thus, she can’t flirt with him making Liara the seemingly better choice.  Liara’s main drawback is that she’s also the object of affection of Herron.  Herron challenges Chapman to a duel to the death.  Chapman wins, but spares Herron’s life.

As a sign of gratitude, Herron offers to help Chapman to escape.  Yes, his ship is missing, but his suit is still around.  If he breathes in some oxygen from his suit’s tank, he’ll return to normal size.  The real challenge is getting the Rhetton close enough to the lunar base that someone notices and comes to rescue Chapman.  Before that can happen, the Solarites attack.  It seems that they’ve noticed Rhetton’s advanced technology and have wanted it ever since.  Will the people of Rhetton defeat the Solarites?  Will Chapman get back to Earth?  You’ll have to watch to find out.

Overall, the movie was pretty good.  Being a product of 1961, there are a few things that people will notice when watching it today.  First, the project is handled by the Air Force.  From what I understand, the Air Force was a frontrunner for the space program until NASA was formed in 1958.  I’m wondering why the Air Force was used.  Even if it was based on a book or short story, it wouldn’t have been that hard to change a few words.  (I suppose it’s possible that the program is run by NASA and staffed by the Air Force.)

One thing that I found on IMDb is a goof wherein Chapman’s ship, when landing on Rhetton, is pointed sideways and going full blast.  This would normally defy what we know of physics not to mention that a ship probably wouldn’t land this way.  It occurred to me that Chapman didn’t really want to land on the planet.  Instead, the people on Rhetton pulled him in against his will.  The sideways-pointing rocket was probably more of an attempt to escape.  The real question is why the people of Rhetton didn’t just deflect his ship and send him flying off in some other direction.

Another issue, also pointed out on IMDb, is that there’s seemingly normal gravity when Chapman and Makonnen go out to fix the ship.  Either they used magnetic boots (which they didn’t seem to) or they should have used a tether.  I know that they’ve mastered gravity on Rhetton, so I think it’s safe to assume that they can manipulate the planet’s gravity to suit their needs.  As for the lunar base and the ship, I’m assuming that since we’ve mastered space flight, we’ve also managed to create artificial gravity.

The acting was a little wooden throughout most of the movie.  The aliens can get away with it, being that they seem to live in a relatively sterile society.  There’s no mention of what they do for fun.  I didn’t see any night clubs or malls or anything.  You’d think that Chapman would get bored and ask if there was a movie theater or something.

While the Solarite ships looked pretty fake, the Solarite costume looked pretty decent.  It did seem like the actor in the suit was having problems as if his visibility was severely limited.  (Notice that the actor hesitated when walking down a few steps.  I don’t think this was the character being cautious.)  Many of the caves also looked like they were made from Styrofoam.  I have to wonder if people of the time accepted this as cutting-edge special effects.

I don’t know that I’d go out of my way to rent this.  If you get it as part of a larger set, like I did, or if it comes on TV, I’d say watch it.  There are worse ways to spend 82 minutes.  The only thing of any interest here is that clips from the movie were used for a La Quinta advertisement.  You may remember the series of ads where La Quinta took a few clips and dubbed over them.  If you’ve seen the ads, you should recognize the scene they used immediately. 

IMDb page

La Quinta commercial uses MST3000 movie Phantom Planet

The Atomic Brain/ Monstrosity (1963)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.


Warning:  I’m going to give away major details about the movie, including the ending.  If you don’t like spoilers and have any intention of watching this movie, you might want to hold off on reading this review.


Hetty March is an old, miserly hag and she knows it.  She’s spent her entire life hoarding money.  Now, she has a plan to take it with her.  She’s contracted with Dr. Otto Frank to find a way to transfer her brain into a hot, young body.  She’ll then change her will to leave all of her fortune to the person whose body she will eventually reside in. 

Dr. Frank isn’t doing so well with his experiments.  Since no credible hospital will let him do experiments, he’s forced to work out of Hetty’s basement.  He’s even reduced to having his henchman steal bodies from the cemetery.  At best, he can make a mindless zombie.  His henchman, in fact, is nothing more than a dog’s brain in a human body.  The dogman can obey orders, but doesn’t seem to have much independent thought.

So, Hetty takes out an ad for a maid.  Three young female candidates all arrive in town, only to meet at the airport.  There’s Nina, the Austrian; Anita, the Mexican and Beatrice, the blonde with the annoyingly fake British accent.  Hetty figures that since they’re all a long way from home and probably don’t want to deal with INS, they’ll be cooperative, or at least hesitant to run.

After inspecting the women, Hetty finds that Anita has a mole on her back.  This is enough to cause Hetty to reject Anita.  At least Dr. Frank has his first live subject to experiment on, so he transfers the brain of a cat into Anita’s body.  When Anita eats a mouse, Hetty realizes that the process has promise.  All that she needs to do is figure out which of the two remaining women she wants to swap bodies with and change her will accordingly.  (Due to Beatrice having a horrible accident, it ends up being Nina.)

As you might expect, it’s not that simple.  Hetty has surrounded herself with people that don’t like the idea of being left out of her will.  She has a boyfriend that realizes that he’ll be dumped shortly after Hetty has better options.  Otto realizes that Hetty will have limited use for him, as well.  Well, the boyfriend isn’t successful at stopping Hetty, but Dr. Frank is.  He puts her brain in the cat’s body and leaves Nina intact.  His plan is to find a way to get the money from Nina.

While Dr. Frank had better luck than the boyfriend, he does eventually suffer the same fate.  The movie ends with Nina running off into the forest surrounding Hetty’s house with Hetty (in the cat’s body) following her.  We’re left to guess as to what becomes of them.  We don’t get to see Nina in a psychiatrist’s office or sitting on a bus bench.  We don’t even get any sort of text or anything.

This was one of those movies that could have been done a lot better.  In fact, I’m sure that there are plenty of brain-swapping movies that have been done better.  If you’re making a movie about transferring your brain to a new body, how about giving us some details?  There are no shaved heads or scars to speak of.  Also, how do you fit a human brain into a cat’s head?  While I’m on the subject, how does putting a dog’s brain into a human body cause the human body to grow fangs?

I’ve also wondered how these doctors and scientists hook up with people that will fund them.  This is before Craig’s List, so you’d probably have local papers at best.  I could just see the ad, “SWF needs mad scientist for some brain-swapping experiments; will provide lab in basement, but you must bring your own bodies”

It’s not rated, but it’s still something you might want to keep the kids away from.  It’s not so much that you see anything as children probably won’t understand what’s going in.  If they do, it’s not really something they should be thinking about.  You don’t see any surgery, but you seeing the dog in a human body might scare some people.  Even though Hetty examines the bodies, you don’t really see anything.  At most, you see their bare backs.  She also prods the women with her cane a little.

I got this as part of a set of ten science-fiction movies, all of which seem to be public domain.  I’ve even seen it as part of other collections, usually as The Atomic Brain.  (You’ll find it on the Internet Movie Database as Monstrosity.)  The video transfer isn’t that good.  I think that St. Claire Vision, the company that released the ten-movie set, didn’t want to put a lot of money into it.  It looks like it was taken from a set of reels that was actually used in a movie theater.  The sound is bad and the dialogue is often truncated, as if the film is missing a few seconds here and there.

I’m sure that there are better transfers, but I doubt that this would help the movie much.  Everything about this movie would tell me that it suffered from a really small budget.  While the concept is good, the dialogue and acting aren’t that good.  Of the three women that were candidates for the brain swap, none of the actresses went on to star in anything else.  (This is also the cat’s only acting credit.)  The only way I could recommend watching it is if it comes on television late at night or you get it as part of a collection of movies like I did.  It’s only 63 minutes, which means that you won’t be wasting too much of your time. 

Atomic Brain trailer

IMDb page

Winterbeast = Re: Bane Twits

Note:  This is a review that was originally posted on Epinions.  With the closing of the site, at least to new content, I've begun to move my old reviews here.  This is one of them.

It’s hard to say what makes one movie a cult classic while another fades off into the sunset.  Some, like Plan 9 From Outer Space, were so bad that they became famous for being bad.  Then, there are those, like Winterbeast, that I hadn’t heard of until I saw it mentioned on badmovies.org.  So, I headed over to Netflix to see just how bad it was.

The movie starts with some sort of bad horror sequence.  After this odd sequence, Ranger Bill Whitman goes in to work at the ranger station.  One of the other rangers, Stillman, is already there taking a report about a ranger who is “gone” as in dead.  Whitman and Stillman figure that the missing ranger stayed out overnight putting up trail markers or something.  All of this is distracting them from sitting around looking at girlie magazines.  Stillman even has a deck of playing cards with pictures of naked women. 

Speaking of naked women, we cut to a woman is getting undressed in the local inn when a really tall monster attacks her.  The monster is tall enough that it can forcibly take her from a second-story room and kill her by beating her against the wall.  I know that it’s a horrible, random way to go, which is to say nothing of the stop-motion animation.

Several more people are killed in horrible, random manners leaving the rangers to wonder if something’s really going on.  Bill wants to put up signs warning people that there may be dangerous things going on around the trails, but Sheldon won’t have any of it.  You see, Sheldon owns the local inn that I was talking about.  Telling people that there’s something dangerous in the area could be bad for business.  (Apparently, it’s better to let a few customers be attacked and killed.)

It turns out that Sheldon has a connection to what’s going on.  A ranger finds the grave of one of Sheldon’s ancestors, but is killed before she can tell anyone.  Whitman and Stillman find him at the inn dancing to an old recording of "Oh, Dear! What Can the Matter Be?"  It’s official:  This guy is totally out of his gourd.  It doesn’t matter, though. We’re not going to have to worry about Sheldon much longer.

From here on out, the movie gets weirder, more disjointed and has a few more deaths.  I mean, I can’t even begin to explain how it unfolds.  It just happens.  The movie ends with the main demon/beast being dispatched.  At least, we hope so.

The tag line for the movie was, “It Must Be Seen To Be Believed.”  This pretty much describes it.  According to the Internet Movie Database, filming was started in 1976.  The project was abandoned, only to be resumed in 1989.  (Two scenes survived from the original filming.)  This may be the primary reason why the movie looks so bad.  It’s not that it’s disjointed.  It’s more like one of those story projects where several people each write a chapter and pass it on to the next person, except that each person only had a vague idea of what the other people were doing.

For instance, the first scene at the ranger station had Whitman and Stillman talking, but it looked like the lines were written after the scene was filmed.  There are cases where the voice doesn’t match the lip movement if there’s any lip movement at all.   The film quality also varied.  Usually, it wasn’t that bad, but there were some scenes where it looked like the film wasn’t developed properly.

There’s a reason that the movie is listed on a site for bad movies.  I could understand if you were going for a cheesy look, but this movie just sucks.  Even if you were going for a really crappy movie, you could have done better.  The acting is wooden and the script isn’t very well developed.  It’s like the story is used to string together some bad stop-motion animation.  I wouldn’t be surprised if, when the writers realized that they ran out of story, they resorted to drugs.  (Note to legal department:  I’m not actually alleging the use of illicit drugs.  I’m just saying that the possibility exists.)

This movie is not suitable for children.  The DVD that I got from Netflix started with one of the characters saying, “Holy s__t!”  Then, you have these monsters that could give small children nightmares.  Add to that the violence and a story that even an adult has trouble understanding and you have something that children should not be exposed to.

In fact, I’d almost recommend that most adults stay away from it, as well.  The one scene that I really liked was the one of the inn proprietor dancing.  It was bizarre, but was at least entertaining.  I think that it makes the rest of the movie worth sitting through.  If you can find a clip of just this scene, I wouldn’t bother renting the rest of the movie, though. 

Time Guardian, your time is up…way too soon

Note:  This review was published on Epinions.  I'm reposting it here with some modification.



I'm always looking for a really bad movie to review.  (Yes, I've seen Plan 9 From Outer Space.)  I think part of it is that I like to punish myself.  It's as if I don't deserve to watch good movies all the time.  Maybe I was inspired by the first-review contests that Epinions used to have.  (Many of these really bad movies had never been reviewed before.)  I had also always wanted to see Epinions put up a best and worst list for each category.  No way to prepare for that like reviewing every one-star movie out there.

What do you do if you are a fellow sadist like me and want to review really bad movies?  If you have access to any sort of on-demand service and they have a free section, this is the best place to look for one-star movies.  This is how I found The Time Guardian.  I truly wish I could just tell you to run in the other direction if you ever see this movie, but you deserve more.  If you are a fellow movie-watching sadist, you deserve to know what you're getting into.

At the very least, it looked interesting.  A city from far in the future is traveling through time to escape some evil cyborgs.  The movie doesn't give a lot of detail about the cyborgs.  We know only that they want some sort of power source from the human city.  We're also led to believe that this is the last human city left.  Apparently, all the others have been destroyed.

Two people, one being a woman played by Carrie Fisher, are sent ahead to prepare the area for the city's arrival, but the two people don't seem to do much other than get into fights and get hurt.  Carrie Fisher's character spends most of her time in the present resting from having a large sphere land on her.  The guy that she's sent back gets some heavy machinery to move rock.  It's not clear exactly what he's doing, but I guess it's what he needs to do.

This leads to one of the more confusing scenes.  We see the machine moving rock with some random people helping.  It's not clear where the people came from or why they're helping.  The movie uses music and camera angle to make it seem more suspenseful than moving rock usually seems to be.  I expected something interesting to happen.  Maybe have a cyborg pop out or something.  Nothing.  Just cut to the next scene.

The use of time travel is the movie is also a little confusing.  There's little talk of the repercussions of time travel, for starters.  Plus, it's not clear how long this technology has been in use by humans.  The movie opens somewhere in the 43rd century or something, but have the humans come from beyond that?  Have they been bouncing around in time or have they been working their way back in time?  Different parts of the movie seem to indicate different things.

The movie looks like it was written and directed by a 3-year-old child.  Half way through the movie, it still felt like they were setting it up.  It took me another quarter of the way through to realize that that was the movie.  It's one long narrative with a battle scene on either end.

I think the only place you'll find this is in the free section of On Demand.   The reason that Comcast won't charge for this crap is that people would be asking for their money back and rightfully so.  It looks like you can buy a used VHS copy, as the link above would indicate.  Netflix doesn't have it listed and IMDb doesn't have any listings for any releases.  I think the only reason it's listed on IMDb is that it is a movie that was released, thus requiring an entry.

Don't bother watching this movie.  It's overpriced at free.