Midnite Movies Marathon, Vol. 2
by Jonathan Doyle and Neil Karassik(with special guest Kiva Reardon)
Continuing in the tradition of last February's Blaxploitation Marathon, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, Neil and I are following Midnite Movies Marathon with a second volume. Once again, we will be joined by special guest Kiva Reardon (of Diegetic Sound) and possibly another surprise guest or two.
While some of the movies this time around are leftovers from Vol. 1, I've also tracked down a few more hidden gems (or possibly duds), in order to keep the selection relatively diverse. At the very least, Vol. 2 should include its fair share of underwater adventure, alien invasion, rabid gorillas, mumbling cave men and washed-up (or still undiscovered) movie stars. There really is no good reason to watch most of these movies, but all it takes is one Invasion of the Bee Girls to make it all worthwhile. -- JD
Invisible Invaders
(MGM Home Entertainment, 4.15.2003)NK: It feels right to kick-off Midnite Movies Marathon, Vol. 2 with an Edward L. Cahn flick, as Cahn's It! The Terror From Beyond was one of the first movies we screened in Vol. 1. Made approximately one year later, Invisible Invaders was one of seven (!) features Cahn directed in 1959 and production-wise it's pretty obvious. Half the film consists of static shots of a group of scientists (or whatever) figuring out a way to make the invisible invaders visible. Other than that, there's lots of stock footage of shit blowing up with a narrator explaining how doomed humans basically are. Pretty rad. The film's most intriguing quality is the alien's practice of reanimating corpses, turning them into zombies. I wonder if George A. Romero saw this before making Night of the Living Dead. One last hilarious observation: when the scientists shoot the invisible alien with a gigantic ray run that reveals their true form, it turns out they look exactly like the creature from It!
JD: Those zombaliens definitely reminded me of the zombies in Night of the Living Dead and even Dawn of the Dead. Like It!, this is an occasionally lifeless exercise in wooden B-movie acting, but to an even greater extent than It!, Invaders is redeemed by moments of explosive action and other eccentric sci-fi flourishes. But to be honest, the greatest thing about Cahn's films is how mercifully short they are. You don't have to wait an hour for the action to start when a movie's only an hour long. For better or worse, this is a poor man's The Day the Earth Stood Still -- what with its Washington-based alien crisis and that panicked military response -- but with far more schlock and no real social conscience to speak of.
Gorilla at Large
(Fox Home Entertainment, 9.11.2007)KR: Visually, Gorilla at Large is borderline distracting. A 3D fifties flick, the colours, neon lights, Anne Bancroft's pink shorts and Cy Miller's uncanny resemblance to Brad Garrett are vibrant enough to merit watching on mute. Things get moral as the meta-monkey action turns to questions of who the real monster is: man, gorilla… or both?
NK: Cameron Mitchell, Anne Bancroft, Lee J. Cobb, Raymond Burr, Lee Marvin AND a big gorilla! Wowzerz, right? The only thing that would've made this candy-colored murder mystery any more enchanting would be seeing it in its original 3D format. Set in a lush carnival, the film's climactic chase -- and tragic resolution -- occurs on a rollercoaster rather than the skyscraper of King Kong. Pretty ingenious. Less ingenious is the actual gorilla-gorilla, who's virtually indistinguishable from the gorilla impostor.
JD: This is a surprisingly lively film full of charismatic actors and memorable gorilla antics -- and it puts the snail's paced Konga (from Midnite Movies Marathon, Vol. 1) to shame. Rather than get bogged-down in convoluted backstory and schemes for the future, these characters are constantly bombarded with baffling new complications. While the actors all play it relatively straight, their combined screen presence makes for consistently engaging viewing, thanks in part to the vitality of the film's carnival setting. It should also be noted that Gorilla at Large is only slightly less credible than The Greatest Show on Earth, the mildly diverting carnival epic that won Best Picture two years earlier.
Alien From L.A.
(MGM Home Entertainment, 6.7.2005)JD: Released in 1988, this Golan-Globus oddity is an inexplicable detour for the Midnite Movies series. In his 2005 review of Alien From L.A., Neil wrote of Kathy Ireland's grating performance, "Boy, is she unappealing in this film. For starters, there's her insanely annoying voice. I was actually clenching my fist as I listened." Believe it or not, he just watched it again after all these years... and he's clenching his fist. I swear! I just saw it.
NK: Here I sit, watching this abysmal piece of crud for the second time in six years. I recall writing that I just wanted my 87 minutes back. Boy, was I naive, because now that's doubled to 174 minutes. What's changed? Kathy Ireland's voice is still excruciating, but her big-ass glasses and frumpy attire make her look like an American Apparel model. Other than that, this still plays like a low-rent amalgam of Super Mario Bros., Indiana Jones and Fraggle Rock. This would be forgivable if the film even remotely performed as lowest-common-denominator fun, but no, it's thoroughly unwatchable dreck and I'm destroying this DVD tonight.
KR: The final stab into my eyes that Alien From L.A. inflicted is the barbaric freeze frame of Kathy Ireland's post-makeover smile (because when you thought the movie couldn't get any worse, why not mix in some sexism?). Assaulting our ears one final time, her face dissolves into a slowmo shot of birds flying over a beach. Watching this movie is like waking up on an unmade mattress, in an unfamiliar room, with no identification and sad brown water marks on the ceiling. What happened? How did I get here? Why did I do this to myself? Stay safe kids. Stay away from Alien From L.A..
Vault of Horror
(Fox Home Entertainment, 9.11.2007)JD: Featuring the great Anna Massey (of Peeping Tom and Frenzy fame) in a small role, Vault of Horror is a strange and original take on the horror anthology film. Although its built around the same tired structuring device as Tales From the Crypt -- a bunch of people gathered together to discuss their personal horror stories -- their stories deviate from horror convention in surprising ways. For example, the second story deals with a woman who has a meltdown in response to her husband's obsession with neatness and order. During her breakdown, she trashes their house, earning her husband's wrath… with surprising results.
NK: Perhaps not as memorable as Tales From the Crypt, this is still a somewhat original riff on a well-worn formula. From clumsy housewives to voodoo paintings to killer ropes, each of the film's five segments end with an unconventional demise. Avoiding many of the typical horror tropes, Vault of Horror is an inventive anthology that completely holds its own.
KR: With an opening akin to the homoeroticism in Hitchcock's Rope and concluding with a story that echoes Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, this film's overall feel is A Nightmare on Elm Street meets Groundhog Day. Well worth it.
The People That Time Forgot
(MGM Home Entertainment, 2.22.2005)JD: In keeping with sequel tradition, this followup to The Land That Time Forgot (one of the highlights of MMM, Vol. 1) is about half as good as its predecessor. Land was more playful, had more vibrant, colorful visuals and a more appealing cast, but both films benefit from those hokey, but still relatively convincing, dinosaur effects. Where this movie really loses its bearings is in its drift to Kurosawian gothic swashbuckling territory in its second half. While this anticipates some of the ideas that reached a wider audience a few years later in Raiders of the Lost Ark, director Kevin Connor is far more comfortable when anticipating another Spielberg film: Jurassic Park. It's an unassailable rule of movies that every dinosaur sequel should have more dinosaurs than the original, not less.
NK: A minor letdown compared to its far more cheesy-charming precursor, People is still a completely watchable matinee adventure. After an impressive intro featuring an aerial pterodactyl attack, the film all but entirely does away with goofy dinos in favor of a barbarous tribe of instigators who look like villains He-Man should battle. Also, as JD mentioned, the exotic, climate shifting locale that made the first film so memorable is replaced by a far more stark palette, full of dingy caves, spooky skulls, slithery snakes and other props that mostly belong in The Goonies. But hey, at least it didn't take these characters half the movie to find some action.
Chosen Survivors
(Fox Home Entertainment, 9.11.2007)KR: Down, down, down we go! Chosen Survivors takes us into a subterranean shelter, created in a post-nuclear world where the American government had the foresight to select a group of people to keep the human race going. The opening sequence sets the bar high as the sedated chosen survivors are forced into a elevator and sent down into their new home. As the elevator crashes, the sound and image slow, so we experience the fall as the drugged characters onscreen do. Chosen Survivors unfortunately gets lost in itself, folding in a horror element with vampire bats when the despair and isolation of the nuclear apocalypse would suffice. Still, the set design, meta-cinematic elements and pulsating sci-fi jazz soundtrack make it well worth it.
NK: Yeesh, this is one bleak Midnite Movie. TV veteran director Sutton Rolley is not fucking around by opening his film with a nihilistic, end-of-the world scenario in which several randomly selected survivors are forced to live in an underground shelter until the earth recovers from its nuclear meltdown, so they can rebuild society. This setting is undeniably sumptuous, brimming with 2001-inspired decor. The story's sci-fi tinged premise jarringly shifts to survivalist horror when uber-bats invade their already dismal situation. Clever enough to continually outsmart the humans, these creatures even known how to create a power outage before attacking the disoriented humans. Perhaps these creatures should inherit the earth.
JD: After getting off to a terrific, enigmatic start, this film definitely gets a bit lost in bat-opalyptic attacks, though this does lead one character to take an unforgettably epic fall from great heights. Seriously, it takes about twenty seconds for this noble olympian to reach his grisly landing -- after having his delicious face severely chewed by vicious, animated bats. In spite of its unfortunate emphasis on those generic bat attacks (battacks?), Chosen Survivors maintains a strikingly dreamy, alienated mood throughout. In addition to 2001, the influence of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and The Shining is felt in one eerie, wide angle flourish after another. In spite of its shortcomings, this is clearly the highlight of Vol. 2 so far.
The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake
(MGM Home Entertainment, 9.20.2005)NK: When watching a handful of B-movies best suited for laid back, late night viewing amongst friends, The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake is pretty much your worst case scenario. It's neither bad enough to be enjoyed as schlock, nor good enough to be enjoyed as legitimate horror. It's just dull. Coasting on just the snoozy scare factor of shrunken heads, the film can hardly survive its 70-minute running time.
JD: By horror standards, this is an incredibly calm film. Judging from these performances, you'd think there was nothing unusual about having a friend who's been put under a curse and sees all kinds of hallucinatory floating skulls. The film coasts by on then-fascinating topics like shrunken heads, Indian mysticism and what look like (hygienically questionable) moustache dreads, but fifty-two years later, it's hard to imagine who the audience for this pitifully square time-waster ever was.
KR: I'd say this movie recalls Herge's The Seven Crystal Balls, but that would be sullying the good name that is Tintin. The most compelling feature of this film is entirely circumstantial: my mother's last name is Drake. The creators of TFSOJD seem convinced that their audience can make no connections between images and ideas, spelling out every detail that we watch; it's technically competent (no boom mics in the frame), but it's lacking thrills and, more importantly, soul.
The Vampire Lovers
(MGM Home Entertainment, 8.26.2003)KR: This movie is loyal to a long history of latent lesbianism in vampire lore, except here it's not latent; it's pushed up front and centre like Ingrid Pitt's breasts (RIP). While this would be easy to dismiss as a homophobic representation of lesbianism, I like this movie so much I'm going for an alternate reading: it's less a fear of lesbians than female sexuality. We're asked to identify with Pitt's character. As she holds Emma and says, "I want you to love me forever," you feel her loneliness. Then there's Pitt's relationship with Mme. Perrodot, which comes to a heartbreaking conclusion. But most of all, there's Emma's horror as vampire Pitt is impaled (penetrated!) and the tragic music as she's beheaded. Lush, tragic and with an optional commentary by Ingrid Pitt, Vampire Lovers is by far the film that took my heart in this marathon.
NK: Apparently the only collaboration between AIP and Hammer, Vampire Lovers is a slight deviation from the typical Christopher Lee-as-Dracula flick (he's nowhere to be seen here). Peter Cushing appears as a vampire hunter (but not Van Helsing) and the nudity has been kicked-up several notches -- lots of bare breasts and then some. In spite of
JD: Ingrid Pitt is one of the most fascinating genre screen presences of the seventies and this movie offers better evidence of that than just about any other. She died in November, but she lives on in this unforgettable performance. As I write this, we're listening to the new Radiohead album for the first time -- on first listen, it sounds like an unforgettable exploration of their dreamy side -- so it's kind of hard to think about lesbian vampires, but this is an incredibly lively, stylish marriage of rich, Hammer gothica and irreverent, AIP eccentricity.
JD: While The Earth Dies Screaming bears a superficial resemblance to some of the creaky, slow-paced duds we saw earlier, it ultimately makes for worthwhile viewing thanks to engaging performances, some peculiar horror flourishes and a lively visual style courtesy of veteran Hammer director Terrence Fisher. The premise is also somewhat intriguing -- nearly everyone in the world has inexplicably dropped dead -- and the mysterious, dialogue-free passages breathe cinematic life into a film that could have easily devolved into inert talkiness. It's not especially groundbreaking, but it's well worth the paltry sixty-two minutes it takes to watch.
NK: For sixty lean minutes of lo-fi sci-fi, The Earth Dies Screaming is a particularly well-executed rehash of the familiar trappings associated with apocalyptic invasions. A flamboyant title, robo-aliens and modest acting are all present, but Fisher's effective use of claustrophobic spaces and vaguely stylish compositions add a good supply of horror to an otherwise routine blueprint. Like Invisible Invaders, there's even the occasional reanimated corpse, but they look far scarier thanks to their freaky, expressionless white eyes -- a nice touch that might've inspired some of Lucio Fulci's zombie-demons.
NK: This is the third film we've seen from Gordon Hessler (who also provided us with the semi-decent The Oblong Box and Cry of the Banshee, both screened during MMM, Vol. 1). Scream and Scream Again -- our second consecutive feature with the word scream in its title, golly -- is a different beast than Hessler's previous Poe-centric gothic yarns. Set in contemporary (as in the seventies) London, it's the grooviest thing we've seen since Invasion of the Bee Girls, with a number of psychedelic dance club sequences where the psycho killer lures his female victims. Also, this is the first Midnite Movie we've seen featuring Hammer all-stars Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price… and featuring it's own theme song! The film is also remarkably bleak, with grisly murders, icky disfigurements and an uber-downbeat conclusion.
JD: Based on the trailer above, you'd think this might be a bonanza of genre film outrageousness. For the first twenty minutes, it seems like this might be the case, but Scream and Scream Again eventually settles into a relatively routine British detective movie. While we do get to see the occasional limb dismemberment or dude-melting-in-acid, too much of the film is standard issue Euro-intrigue. The aforementioned grooviness makes it go down a bit easier -- and it's always nice to see that crazy nurse wreak havoc on another defenceless character -- but the filmmakers don't adequately exploit the potential of the film's contemporary setting or fulfill the promise of those memorably perverse horror highlights.
The Earth Dies Screaming
(Fox Home Entertainment, 9.11.2007)
Scream and Scream Again
(MGM Home Entertainment, 8.27.2002)
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