Tom Tryon gets his body taken over by an alien being on the eve of his wedding.  Soon after he gets married, his wife Gloria Talbott starts noticing that he isn’t quite the same.  He becomes distant, has the ability to see in the dark, and dogs and cats suddenly hate his guts.  She eventually realizes that her husband is not of this earth.  Pretty soon, more aliens start inhabiting the bodies of all the males in town and it’s up to the neurotic newlywed to find someone who will believe her about the imminent invasion.

What makes I Married a Monster from Outer Space work is that director Gene (I Was a Teenage Werewolf) Fowler, Jr. doesn’t treat the material as if it’s a cheesy 50’s Sci-Fi flick.  The film looks classy as the camera moves around a lot and the cinematography is excellent.  The script by Louis (The Rebel Set) Vittes is nicely layered and doesn’t descend into melodrama, which is refreshing.  Like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman from the same year, I Married a Monster from Outer Space has an interesting feminist slant that raises it a notch or two above the usual genre standards.  The script even goes into the otherwise taboo area of the aliens mating with humans to produce “our” children.

The effects are top notch.  The cool looking aliens resemble Man-Thing on acid and can shoot disintegrating rays out of their hands.  There’s also a great scene when the glowing aliens get shot and their skin immediately heals over the wound.  I also dug the part where the human host melted into bubbly goo after the connection to their mother ship was broken.

The performances are engaging and add a lot of depth to the film.  Gloria (The Leech Woman) Talbot is quite memorable as the suspicious wife and Tryon is pretty good as the aloof alien.  My only real complaint with the flick was that we never really get a chance to know what his character was like before he became an alien.  In movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Invaders from Mars, we get a real sense of what the characters were like before they were possessed by aliens.  Here, we basically just have to take the wife’s word that her hubby’s acting bizarre.

Another thing that I thought was weird about the film was that Tryon actually STOPS drinking once he gets married.  I think the filmmakers really missed a bet here.  I mean wouldn’t it be cooler if it was the other way around and he started drinking MORE once he got married?  I think they call that “social commentary” or something.

When the CEO of an advertising firm dies, Putney Swope (Arnold Johnson), the only African-American board member is put in charge. He quickly fires all the white help and hires a bunch of black militants as advisers and renames the company, Truth and Soul. Swope intends to run the company into the ground and produces some really crazy commercials that feature nudity and cussing. Ironically, his clients end up loving them.

Putney Swope is one of those underground 60’s movies that really needs to be seen during the time of it’s original release to get the intended impact. I’m sure it must’ve really wowed people back then but for me, it felt more than a tad dated. That said, the film still holds up a lot better than a lot of similar movies from that era.

Director Robert (Up the Academy) Downey, Sr. films the flick in black and white and only uses color during Swope’s outrageous commercials. These short ads are easily the best part of the film and deliver the biggest chuckles. (My favorite was the one for the pimple cream.) The problem is that the scenes of Putney and his underlings are scattershot at best and lack the zing of the commercials. While the movie gets off to a promising start, the laughs become increasingly erratic as it goes along.

Putney gets the best line of the movie when he meets “The Arab” (played by Antonio “Huggy Bear” Fargas) and asks, “Who are you supposed to be, Lawrence of Nigeria?”

There were a lot of low budget independently produced would-be cult items populating video store shelves in the late 80’s and early 90’s.  Some of them were downright painful to sit through.  Every now and then you’d get a random slice of WTF that had a certain charm to it.  That’s an adequate enough description of Sonny Boy.

A white trash crime lord named Slue (Paul L. Smith from Pieces) finds a baby in the backseat of a stolen car and is about two seconds away from selling him when his wife Pearl (David Carradine in drag) forces him to keep the kid.  Slue names the kid Sonny Boy and raises him like an animal and keeps him locked up in the back of his ice cream truck.  He also cuts out Sonny Boy’s tongue and teaches him to kill his enemies.  When Sonny Boy kills one of the townsfolk, the community rallies together and tries to lynch him.  Finally, Slue finds his paternal instincts and protects his son against the rioting villagers by blowing up a lot of people with his antique cannon.

Sonny Boy is more or less just a bunch of weirdness for weirdness sake but that didn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it.  The cast was excellent and Carradine was particularly amazing.  He really commits 100% to the role and never makes his character jokey or campy.  Whether he was supposed to be playing a tranny or a real woman is left unanswered.  That’s part of what made the whole thing work though.

Although I liked the quirky tone of the movie, some things were just too goofy for words.  Take for instance Sonny Boy’s eloquent inner monologues.  How in the world could he possibly speak so expressively when he’s been locked up in an ice cream truck all his life?  Then there was the dim bulb bubbleheaded blonde who tries to pick up Sonny Boy and start a romance with him.  What could you possibly see in a guy who’s missing a tongue and lives in the back of an ice cream truck?

The film probably runs about 20 minutes too long which prevents it from achieving its maximum entertainment potential.  Having said that, the ending where Smith and Carradine (in drag) get into a slow motion shootout with a bunch of unruly Molotov cocktail chucking bikers is some of the nuttiest cinematic shenanigans I’ve seen in a long time.  Carradine also sings the theme song, “Maybe It Ain’t”.

Back in the 80’s, everyone had an exercise video.  Jane Fonda, Dixie Carter, and even Ginger Lynn all tried to get everyone off the couches and into shape.  Of all the A-List, B-List, and C-List celebrities that starred in their own workout tape, Laura Gemser’s has to be the strangest.  Not that I claim to be an expert in the field.  I mean, the last workout video I watched was the Cindy Crawford one and I wasn’t exactly watching that for the aerobics if you know what I mean and I think you do.  

It’s not the fact that Gemser is such a low rent celebrity that makes this flick so downright weird.  I mean, I’m a big fan of Gemser’s Black Emanuelle series and I jumped at the chance to see this.  (I’ve watched worse movies that held less promise.)  But nothing, NOTHING could have prepared me for… THIS.  I have to go on record here by saying that Gemser’s foray into the exercise video field, Looking Good With Laura Gemser is the single most bizarre fucking workout video I have ever seen in my life.

Scratch that:  Looking Good With Laura Gemser is the single most bizarre fucking THING I have ever seen in my life.

God where do I begin?  Let’s start with the fact that Laura DOESN’T EVEN DO ANY OF THE FUCKING EXERCISES!  Mostly, she just sits in a huge wicker chair and commands everyone else to do the exercises while she delivers a monotone voiceover.  Early in the video, she tells us that she does these exercises to maintain her figure because she’s a movie star and stuff.  We never once though see her do anything other than some simple stretches.  Sometimes they’ll cut to a close-up of her on the floor smiling after the exercise is over and done with to make it look like she really did it but even a near-sighted four year-old could tell you she didn’t do shit.

I think the most hilarious part was when she says that “anyone can do these exercises” including her instructor, who happens to be PREGNANT.  I know these exercises are decidedly low impact so I’m sure a preggo person could do it, but does that mean that at the end of the video Gemser can SIT on top of the poor pregnant woman like she was a human throne?  I can hear her now.  “Hey pregnant lady, go do all these exercises.  Oh wait, are you tired?  Here lay flat on your belly on the floor and prop your feet upwards.  Why?  Because I’m going to SIT ON YOU LIKE A FUCKING HUMAN THRONE GODDAMN IT, THAT’S WHY!”

The program is only an hour long but I’ll be damned if it didn’t seem a Hell of a lot longer.  To add insult to injury, just about half the goddamn video is filmed in slow motion.  I’m guessing if they didn’t do that, the video would’ve only been about 25 minutes.  To further pad the running time, the last ten minutes of the video is a “freestyle” dance session where all the women just uh… dance.  They even do The Robot at one point.  I’m not kidding.

Folks, I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.

How do I even issue a star rating for this thing?  Judging Looking Good With Laura Gemser for what it was intended is an easy task.  No one in their right mind would ever do any of these exercises.  No one in their right mind could stand the nausea inducing slow motion.  No one in their right mind would trust an exercise video by someone who was too lazy to do the exercises themselves.  No one in their right mind would follow the advice of anyone who sat on a pregnant lady.  So in that respect, the flick gets No Stars.  BUT… since this is the looniest shit I’ve ever laid eyes on; I have to give it at least One Star for the utter absurdity of it all.

Laura’s best instruction:  “Sweat!  That’s what I want you to do!”

When Donnie Darko was released, Mind Fuck Movies like Fight Club and Memento were all the rage.  I saw it on video when it first came out and instantly loved director Richard Kelly’s unique vision and loopy Kubrickian logic.  Unfortunately, in the past couple of years, the flick has been embraced by the pathetic pseudo-Goth Emo teeny-boppers that frequent Hot Topic and wear too much eyeliner.  You can’t talk about Donnie Darko without one of these poseurs chiming in and telling you how it’s a movie for “their generation” and “perfectly encapsulates what they’re all about”.  Well, I’m here today to take Donnie Darko back from those worthless fucks.  Donnie Darko belongs to open-minded moviegoers that can appreciate originality and clever twist endings and not to whiny Emo cuntflaps who will cut themselves wide open with a razor at the drop of a hat because their mascara got a little runny.

If you already don’t know the plot:  Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a disturbed teenager who has a history of arson and pops scripts like crazy.  He starts having visions of a demented bunny rabbit named Frank who tells him that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds.  Donnie also finds out that he can somehow travel through time thanks to bubbles that come out of his chest.

I know I’m not explaining it very well, but I don’t want to give away the surprises that the film holds.  One of the flick’s many charms is that you’re assured to be surprised even after repeated viewings.  That’s part of the fun of the movie.

Kelly effectively creates a world that is sublimely locked in time (1988) yet feels like it could happen today.  It’s a place that seems otherworldly but looks perfectly ordinary.  He also crafts a bat shit insane ending that simultaneously wraps things up and leaves you scratching your head trying to piece everything together.  The man can also film a jazz recital like no one in the business.  How many directors can brag about that?

Then there are the performances.  Gyllenhaal is note perfect as Donnie.  He’s awkward like a real teenager yet he still possesses a potentially dangerous aura around him.  Jena Malone does some stellar work as Donnie’s love interest and Mary McDonnell is MILF-errific as his caring mother.  But hands down the best actor in the bunch is Patrick Swayze.  He plays this diluted self-help guru with a sleazy past.  His informercials are hilarious and his pep rally speech to the school is a classic.  It’s easily the man’s best performance since Road House.

These Emo idiots nowadays try to live their life based around Donnie Darko.  They think that they’re just like Donnie because they take medication too.  (It’s probably for asthma not schizophrenia.)  They need to get a life.  Either that or go watch Twilight or something.  Leave the good movies to the rest of us.

PS:  Donnie Darko:  The Director’s Cut is to be avoided at all costs as it tries to over-explain things and features different song cues which ruin the overall mood of the film.

Donnie Darko is filled with enough trippy coolness to land it on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of the Year for 2001 at the Number 8 spot, smack dab in between The Royal Tenenbaums and Ocean’s Eleven.

Russ (West Side Story) Tamblyn stars as an undercover cop posing as a teenage marijuana dealer (making this the 21 Jump Street of it’s day) who is out to bust the drug trade at an All-American school.  He moves in on the teenage gang (called “The Wheeler-Dealers”) led by John Drew Barrymore and eventually has to shoot heroin to prove he’s a real juvenile delinquent. 

Directed by Jack (The Creature from the Black Lagoon) Arnold, High School Confidential is a campy and entertaining juvenile delinquent movie.  It’s got more than its share of lulls and while it’s not great or anything, how can you possibly not like a movie that contains:

• Jerry Lee Lewis playing piano and singing the title tune on the back of a pickup truck.

• Mamie Van Doren as the sexed-up auntie who tries to seduce her juvenile delinquent nephew.  (“Relatives should always kiss each other hello and goodbye!”)

• Marijuana dealers that would look at home in Reefer Madness.  (“I’m grazing for grass!”)

• Terrible beatnik poetry.  (“Tomorrow is Dragsville.  Tomorrow is a King-Sized Drag!”)

• Michael (I Was a Teenage Werewolf) Landon as a drag racer.

• Jackie (Uncle Fester!!!) Coogan as a heroin pusher.

• Lyle (Plan 9 from Outer Space) Talbot as a square-jawed policeman.

• More slang than you can shake a stick at.  (“Can you dig it?”)
   

Billy Jack (Tom Laughlin) is a half breed Indian who doesn’t like it when the racist redneck townsfolk mess around with the hippie students who go to school on his reservation.  Whenever somebody is cruel to one of the hippies, Billy Jack Kung Fus the crap out of them.  Despite their differences, Billy Jack and the hippies try to live peacefully among the townspeople, but when the mayor’s son rapes Billy’s girlfriend (Delores Taylor), Billy Jack goes out for vengeance.

Billy Jack is the kind of movie that gets a lot of crap about the main character’s so-called pacifism.  To me, Billy Jack never was a pacifist.  The kids at the school are, sure and his girlfriend most certainly is.  In fact, she doesn’t tell Billy that she got raped because she KNOWS he’ll go out and kill the creep who did it!  Pacifists don’t usually run out at kill rapists at the drop of a hat now do they? 

Speaking of completely unnecessary violence, I especially liked the way that Billy Jack dished out his own brand of justice.  Example:  A couple of Indians go into an ice cream parlor and the guy behind the counter refuses to serve them because they are non-whites.  Some jackass (the same guy who’ll later rape Billy’s girlfriend) then proceeds to throw flour in their face to make them look “white”.  Billy shows up, gets this extremely pained look on his face, gives them a stern talking-to, and then unleashes a can of Indian Whoop Ass on the punks, as well as a couple of rowdy townspeople who don’t cotton to Billy’s ways.

The scenes where Billy Jack Kung Fus the crap out of intolerant redneck troublemakers are pretty awesome, but for Christ’s sakes, this flick features way too much of the damn hippies and not nearly enough of Billy Jack kicking ass.  Literally half of the film’s running time is devoted to hippie songs, hippie committee meanings, hippie improvisational stage plays, and hippie street performances.  It’s enough to make you wanna puke.  All I got to say is, thank God for the 80’s.

There’s a lot of good stuff in Billy Jack though; mainly Billy Jack himself.  He’s a badass alright.  He karate chops the shit out of people real good and even the scene where he did a little rain dance around a snake and let it bite him a dozen times so he could have a “vision” was pretty cool.  I mean at one point in the movie, Billy Jack gets shot and isn’t even fazed by it!  That’s badass.

The problem is… BILLY JACK IS BARELY IN THE DAMN MOVIE!  The flick runs a L-O-N-G 114 minutes and probably only ten or fifteen minutes of it is devoted to Billy Jack kicking ass and taking names.  Most of the film just centers around a bunch of hippies doing hippie shit, so it drove me completely bugshit. 

Billy Jack is slightly better than Born Losers (the first Billy Jack movie), if only for the classic ice cream parlor scene.  The theme song, “One Tin Soldier” is also quite memorable and will end up getting stuck in your head for days.  A random hippie chick gets the best line of the movie when she scolds Billy’s girlfriend:  “Damn your pacifism!  I’m not going to let that sick animal get away with this!”

Followed by The Trial of Billy Jack.

Scientists on a tropical island are doing a bunch of weird experiments that result in praying mantises growing to enormous size.  While a few mantises are throwing some dirt around, they unearth a giant egg which contains Minya, the Son of Godzilla.  The hungry insects try to chow own on poor defenseless Minya and Godzilla has to kick the crap out of some oversized bugs.  He body slams one bug and then uses his fire-breath on two others before the other one beats cheeks.  After being somewhat of a deadbeat dad (Godzilla likes to sleep a lot), the G-Man eventually teaches his kid how to blow his fire-breath.  When a giant spider tries to turn Minya into a cocoon, Godzilla once again has to kick some overgrown insect ass.  In the end, Godzilla finally gets to take his much needed nap.

I’m a diehard Godzilla fan; and while I personally prefer G-Man when he’s big and bad and mean, stomping on cities and turning people into crispy critters with his fire-breath to his more kid-friendly later years, even I have to admit that Son of Godzilla is a lot of fun.  The scenes of Godzilla and Minya having father and son bonding time are surprisingly touching.  The part when Minya hitches a ride on his daddy’s tail is... well....  Look, I’m not the kind of guy who throws around the word “cute” a lot, but that’s what that little sucker is, cute.  And then there’s the classic scene where Daddy Godzilla teaches his son how to breathe fire and he just blows smoke rings, which is just about the best scene in any Godzilla movie. 

Anyone with half a heart couldn’t help but love this movie.  Sure, like most Godzilla movies, it takes a long time for the G-Man to put in an appearance and the scenes featuring the human actors will bore you to tears.  Would I have preferred Godzilla squaring off against other gigantic monsters instead of a bunch of cranky insects?  Of course.  That’s okay though because Godzilla still kicks their ass and even gives little Minya a chance to get his licks in too.

Godzilla’s next stop was in Destroy All Monsters.

AKA:  Monster’s Island Decisive Battle:  Godzilla’s Son.

Dwain Esper, the man who brought us the immortal Reefer Madness, directed this hilarious cult classic that plays like a Frankenstein movie cross pollinated with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat”.

A psychotic physician blackmails an out of work actor (“Once a ham, always a ham!”) into assisting him in his experiments in which he tries to bring the dead back to life.  After the assistant murders the doctor, he hides his corpse behind the basement wall and uses his acting talents to impersonate the doctor.  The dude gets so crazy that he plucks the eyeball out of a cat and eats it.  (“It’s not unlike an oyster or a grape!”)  He also experiments on a drug that turns a patient into a wild screeching maniac who rips the clothes off of a woman and rapes her.  Eventually the cops come and discover the doctor’s body and lock the assistant’s nutty ass up.

To get away with the lurid subject matter, Esper tacked on a written prologue warning the audience of the dangers of mental illness, as well as title cards in between scenes giving us a lot of medical terminology.  You see because the title cards were “informative”, the nudity and murder was OK.  (Esper did the same thing with Reefer Madness.)  Esper’s directorial style is a little flat and stagy, but the constant close-ups of the mad doctor’s face superimposed over shots of devils (stolen footage from Haxan) are really effective.

While it may seem a little tame by today’s standards, Maniac is one of the earliest exploitation movies ever made and therefore it comes highly recommended.  There’s murder, nudity, catfights (one between two women and another involving actual cats) and a little bit of gore.  Filmmakers would later take these elements and run with them, but the groundwork was first laid here with Maniac. 

Maniac sits atop of the Video Vacuum Top Ten of the Year for 1934 at the Number One spot.

AKA:  Sex Maniac.

In the annals of bad filmdom, Ed Wood usually gets singled out as the BEST worst director of all time.  I agree with that because Wood made very personal movies that just happened to be very ineptly shot, directed and acted.  If we’re talking about the WORST worst director of all time though; that honor would have to go to Coleman Francis.  Although Francis was primarily an actor (who worked with everyone from Ray Dennis Steckler to Russ Meyer), the three films he directed; Red Zone Cuba, The Skydivers, and this flick, are some of the worst movies ever made.  The Beast of Yucca Flats is probably Francis’ Plan 9 from Outer Space and while it still sucks hardcore, it’s made watchable by the presence of Swedish wrestler (and frequent Ed Wood star) Tor Johnson.

Johnson stars as a Russian scientist who wanders out into the middle of Yucca Flats during some atomic testing and gets blasted by the A-Bomb.  He becomes a hulking, blank-eyed, crusty faced monster who has a penchant for strangling young women.  In the end, he gets gunned down while a bunny gives his dead corpse some kisses.

Technically speaking, a blind person could have made a better movie. 

There’s the inane narration (provided by Francis himself) that features such hilarious non-sequiturs like “Flag on the moon... how did it get there?”, countless scenes where the actors’ mouths are obscured while they say dialogue (it saves money on sound, plus it’s probably better that way when Tor Johnson is doing the talking), a highly erratic musical score that totally does not fit the action on screen (the orchestra will swell whenever someone just happens to drive down the highway), confusing editing, and some truly awful performances.  This movie straight up reeks.  And don’t even get me started on the ending where Tor kisses a bunny either. 

On the plus side, it’s less than an hour long and the opening scene (which was shot after the fact to spice things up) has some brief nudity if you are eagle-eyed enough.  Also, I’m an unabashed Tor Johnson fan, so any movie he’s in deserves at least one star for his presence alone.

Suggested Drinking Game:  Take a shot every time the narrator says “Joseph Javorsky”.

AKA:  Girl Madness.  AKA:  The Atomic Monster:  The Beast of Yucca Flats.  AKA:  The Violent Sun.

Wow, I’ve been staring at my computer screen for about ten minutes now trying to come up with the words that would describe the notorious cult flop Myra Breckinridge and the only word I can think of is BAD.

The studio system from the Golden Age of film was crumbling by the late 60’s and they were starving for any kind of “hip” and “edgy” product they thought could reach the flower power generation.  Sometimes this desperateness worked.  In 1970, 20th Century Fox released the immortal classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.  On the other hand, the same year they also unleashed this turd.  It’s a sloppy, unfocused, unfunny and offensive mess.

What happens in the movie (since I hesitate to use the word “plot”) is that film critic Rex Reed gets a sex change to become Raquel Welch and goes on a mission to shake up the establishment by turning straight people gay and by teaching subversive techniques at her uncle John Huston’s acting school while Mae West fucks a lot of men.

Or something like that.

This movie is just straight-up awful.  Seriously, Rex Reed is in no position to give a movie a bad review EVER after starring in this shit heap.  There are a lot of scenes that are supposed to be funny that drag on without a punchline and several more that are just too stupid for words.  You can get some satisfaction from watching a parade of guest stars like John Carradine, Jim Backus, and Buck Kartalian and up-and-coming folks like Farrah Fawcett and Tom Selleck too.  That will only do so much for you though.  Still I guess if you ever wanted to see Raquel Welch rape a dude with a strap-on, then this is the movie for you.

The 77 year-old West (who also sings a dynamite version of “Hard to Handle”) gets the only laughs in the movie with her patented array of one-liners, only about half of which are even funny.  My favorite was when a cowboy told Mae that he was 6 feet 7 inches tall and she replied:  “Never mind about the 6 feet, let’s talk about the 7 inches!”

During WWII, a quartet of debauched Italian fascists decides they all should have an orgy for 120 days so they go around the countryside rounding up a bunch of young boys and girls and take them to a secluded mansion where they can get down and funky.  First, they get these old bitches to stand up in front of everybody and tell some sexy stories (there was no internet porn in those days so this was the closest thing to erotica these people had) until the leaders get so aroused that they have to fuck anything that breathes.  One day, one of the old bitches tells a story about poop and it’s such a smashing success that the leaders get the bright idea to make everybody eat their own shit.  In the end, the leaders kinda flip out and tie up all their orgy participants and gouge out their eyes, burn off their nipples, cut off their tongues and scalp them.  The End.

Salo has hands down one of the most fucked up movies I have ever seen in my life so that alone makes it highly recommended right there.  You should have an iron clad stomach and preferably not eat anything before you sit down to watch it though.  The thing I liked about Salo is that it was short on plot and long on crazy shit (literally).  There was always something insane happening and that made me want to watch every fucking second of the movie, even when I was turning my head in disgust.  Speaking of disgust, Salo also features enough scenes of naked girls eating shit than I don’t know what.

This flick must have been the 2 Girls 1 Cup of its day.

Salo would’ve naturally gotten the four star treatment but I had to knock a star off for the gratuitous amounts of man on man action.  I’m not a homophobe or anything; I just believe in equal representation.  Case in point:  there is almost an hour and forty five minutes of man on man stuff, but like only forty five seconds of girl on girl action.  If director Pier Paolo Pasolini gave the same amount of time to both the lesbians and the gay guys, Salo would’ve been one for the record books. 

Still, this movie freaked people out so bad that they murdered Pasolini in the street shortly after the film premiered!  Christ, the movie is so fucked up that the director got killed over it, so I can’t bear to give it a negative review.  (It seems that getting murdered is the harshest review of them all.)

Besides, any movie that features turds being served on a buffet can’t be all bad.

A quintet of female prisoners escapes from jail and take off into the desert and get involved in all kinds of trouble.  They steal clothes from a bunch of dirty hippies, roll an unsuspecting motorist, battle some bikers, and rape a cripple’s wife while he watches helplessly.  It all ends with a big fight at a gravel pit.

Fugitive Girls is really stupid and cheap but that didn’t stop me from enjoying it immensely.  It was written by none other than the man himself, Ed Wood and features enough trademark Wood moments to make it a blast for his fans.  There are the patented Ed Wood driving scenes where the film cuts from day to night and back to day again within the same scene.  There’s the scene where the horny female criminals rape an unwilling man by the side of the road that’s almost exactly like the one found in Wood’s The Violent Years.  And best of all, Wood himself co-stars in not one but TWO roles! 

I also liked the fact that Wood and director A.C. Stephens employed the five women’s naked bodies to their fullest potential and used ANY excuse for them to take their clothes off, no matter how flimsy.  (My favorite was when they had to strip off all of their clothes to check them for lice).  The prison itself was freaking hilarious.  The budget was so low that Stephens couldn’t afford to film the movie in an actual prison so he filmed it in a goddamn summer camp instead!  Pure fucking genius!  And come to think of it, this may be the only Women in Prison movie in which you never got to see one damn prison guard!

Wood and Stephens also collaborated on the timeless classic Orgy of the Dead.  Co-star Rene Bond also starred in Wood’s Necromania.

AKA:  Five Loose Women.  AKA:  Hot on the Trail.  AKA:  Women’s Penitentiary 8.

A team of astronauts headed to the moon are knocked off course by a comet.  While making repairs, the sole woman in the group (Marie Windsor) gets telepathic messages telling her to land on “the dark side of the moon”.  (They must be Pink Floyd fans.)  Turns out that the messages were coming from the Cat-Women; a race of hot chicks that like to wear skintight spandex costumes and serious eye make-up.  (They also have a knack for badly choreographed dance routines, but the less said about that, the better.) 

Of course the Cat-Women want to use the astronauts and take over Earth.  Of course one of the weaker Cat-Women falls in love with one of the square-jawed men.  Of course the astronauts have to kill a lot of bitchy Cat-Women.

Of all of the extraterrestrial female-ran society movies of the 50’s, I’d have to say that Queen of Outer Space is my favorite.  Cat-Women of the Moon is probably a close second though.  While it ain’t great by any shakes, if you’re into cheesy 50’s Sci-Fi films, you certainly can do a lot worse.  The flick starts out fine, but once the astronauts make contact with the Cat-Women, there’s a lot of scenes of them just sitting around talking and not enough action.  Not to mention that it features one of the lamest non-endings ever.  That’s okay though because shit like this is right up my alley so I was able to excuse the flick for its various shortcomings.

What I liked best was the awesomely bad special effects.  Like how the spaceship's seats were actually thinly veiled patio lounge chairs and office furniture; or how the astronauts’ radiation suits were nothing more than bee keeper outfits.  The highlight though was the giant spider attack.  Honestly folks, there are few things finer in this life than seeing a bunch of cut-rate 50’s actors fend off a giant rubber spider. 

Cat-Women of the Moon was originally filmed in 3-D, but its okay to watch the 2-D version because nothing really leaps out at the screen anyways.  The excellent score was by none other than Elmer Bernstein.  He also did the equally great music for another Grade Z classic, Robot Monster the same year.  This film was later remade as Missile to the Moon, which I guess I’ll have to check out at some point, seeing as I can’t get enough of 50’s chicks in tight spandex outfits.

AKA:  Rocket to the Moon.

Good golly Miss Molly, this is one weird movie. 

Okay, so there’s this horse trainer who’s about to be married off to a woman (Sirpa Lane) he never met.  When the chick finally arrives, all she does is masturbate and fantasize about being raped by a hairy beast with a giant penis that continuously ejaculates all over her.  In the end, we learn that her husband was actually the beast, but he ends up dying in his sleep, so the wedding is called off. 

Like I said, weird.  I’ve seen some fucked up shit in my time, but the scenes of a hot, horny and hairy monster shooting jizz all over a hot French broad’s ta-ta’s has to go down in cinema history as some of the craziest shit ever put on the silver screen.  There’s also a pretty hot scene where Lane masturbates with a rose and shoves that bad boy up her hoo-ha!  I’ve heard of a rose bush before but that shit was ridiculous. 

The problem with The Beast is that it takes one whole hour before we get to the beast sex.  The first sixty minutes of this movie play out like some half assed Masterpiece Theater shit with a bunch of stupid French people trying to organize a wedding.  Supposedly director Walerian Borowczyk had planned this as part of his anthology movie, Immoral Tales but he decided to expand it to feature length.  I think he made a big mistake.  The Beast would’ve been a perfect movie if it only ran about 45 minutes or so.  As it is, it’s got entirely too much of that Masterpiece Theater shit in the beginning that gum up the works. 

The opening scene is a doozy however as we get to see some graphic scenes of horses humping.  I never thought I’d ever see throbbing horse cock ever penetrating pulsating equine pussy in a movie, but here it is.  (This flick would make an excellent double feature with Emanuelle in America.)

Had the film been nothing but the beast scrumping and shooting cum every which way, The Beast would’ve been a classic.  Unfortunately, the first hour (horse humping scenes excluded) of the flick is some of the most boring shit ever committed to celluloid.  One Star for the first half of the flick, Four Stars for the second.  That works out to be a ** ½ average.  Still worth a look for all the scenes of the monster using Sirpa Lane as a cum dumpster.

AKA:  The Beast in Heat.  AKA:  The Devil’s Ecstasy. 

Director Bert I. Gordon usually makes flicks about giants.  The Amazing Colossal Man was all about a giant Colossal Man.  The Beginning of the End was all about giant grasshoppers.  Earth vs. the Spider was all about a giant spider.  With Attack of the Puppet People, Gordon decided to go the other route and do a movie about small people.  And I’m not talking about Gary Coleman; I’m talking about REALLY small people. 

The plot has this kindly old doll maker who actually isn’t very kindly at all because he likes to shrink people down to doll size and keep them locked up in little tubes.  B Movie stalwart John (Revenge of the Creature) Agar and his fiancée are the doll maker’s latest victims and they try to convince the other half dozen or so puppet people to stop living in a doll house and try to get back to normal size.  They reluctantly agree (being the size of a Ken doll is more fun than you’d think) and they plan their escape during one of the old man’s puppet shows. 

Attack of the Puppet People isn’t nearly as much fun as Gordon’s other cult classics but there is enough cheesy goodness here to make it worthwhile for fans of 50’s junk.  See one of the doll women belt out a love song!  See the puppet people try to dial a rotary phone!  See the little folk chased by a giant rat!  See the infinitesimal Agar get cornered by a humongous dog! 

I got to hand it to Bert.  Even though the man makes movies of varying quality, he sure knows how to film a pint-sized chick taking a bubble bath in a coffee can.  Bert is also no slouch when it comes to shameless self promotion as he even threw in a few scenes from his classic Amazing Colossal Man during Agar’s drive-in date. 

In short, Attack of the Puppet People is no classic, but it’s a lot better than Honey I Shrunk the Kids. 

Random Note:  I didn’t know lingerie for dolls were so popular!

AKA:  Six Inches Tall.  AKA:  The Fantastic Puppet People.

Corrine “Third Degree” Burns (Diane Lane), her cousin (Laura Dern) and sister (some other broad) run away from home to be in a punk rock band called The Stains.  They land a gig opening for a British punk band called The Looters, led by Billy (Ray Winstone), who develops a thing for the spitfire Corrine.  The Stains gain notoriety when a local news reporter does a story on Corrine, who captures the hearts of the tri-county area’s disaffected female youth populace with her skunk hairdo, fishnet stockings and motto:  “We Don’t Put Out!”  Eventually all the girls start dressing up like their idol and buying stuffed skunk dolls.  Predictably, The Stains sell out and leave their disillusioned fans holding the bag. 

I don’t necessarily have a problem with the clichés naturally built in to a rock n’ roll movie, but let’s get real, you’ve seen this all before and done much better.  While it’s kinda fun seeing a young Diane Lane running around wearing next to nothing, her character is so grating that it gives the film no one to root for.  It’s not like one of those deals where success goes to her head and she starts acting like a jerk; she IS a jerk for most of the movie, even BEFORE she gets famous. 

The reason why punk rock never lasted is because once record companies got a hold of the bands, they homogenized them into a more marketable item.  (Hence, “punk” became “New Wave”.)  The same thing happened with this film.  If it had been produced by an independent company, the rock n’ roll sequences might have felt a little more real.  Since it’s a Paramount Picture, it all feels a little too “safe”.  Even the presence of Steve Jones and Paul Cook from The Sex Pistols (who penned a handful of decent songs for the soundtrack) can’t help the flick. 

By the time the film came out, punk music was passé, so the studio barely released it; leading people to assume that it’s some kind of a lost classic.  Now that’s it’s out on DVD and I’ve actually watched it, I’d say that they shelved it not because they couldn’t market it, but because really, it’s just not very good.

I did have fun spotting Debbie (Play-Mate of the Apes) Rochon as a groupie though. 

Three hippie couples leave their 9 to 5 routine behind to drive their motorcycles out to the middle of nowhere and take a lot of acid.  Once completely wasted, there is topless swimming, nude body painting, girls sinking in quicksand, a topless knife fight, run-ins with Indian pimps, and sex on a pyramid.  Things begin to get weird though once the couples actually go inside the pyramid and the acid really starts to kick in.  Suddenly Buck (Gymkata) Kartalian turns into the Devil (complete with pointy goatee) and pokes people with a plastic pitchfork while they have sex and dance around topless.

The Acid Eaters is nothing more than an hour of plotless, drug-fueled, softcore nonsense courtesy of director Byron (The Bushwhacker) Mabe.  It’s obvious that the budget was nonexistent as the sets were crappy (the “pyramid” was just a bunch of cardboard boxes stacked really high and painted silver) and the costumes were pretty awful (the Devil outfit is nothing more than red pajamas with a hood).  One good thing to be said for the costumes is that most of the girls don’t stay in them for very long.  The flick only runs one hour long, which is a plus, but too much of the film is padded with pointless scenes of people riding around on motorcycles.

The ladies, who include Pat (Orgy of the Dead) Barrington, Bambi (Hell’s Bloody Devils) Allen and Sharon (A Smell of Honey, A Swallow of Brine) Carr, are gorgeous and look even better when cavorting around topless and gyrating to thoroughly wretched hippie music.  The presence of a real actor like Kartalian helps somewhat, but he isn’t really given a whole lot to do except be the comic relief and say shit like “What’s your pleasure, treasure?”

If you watch movies SOLELY for the purposes of seeing tripping topless chicks dancing aimlessly while out of work character actors go around mugging constantly for the camera, consider this your Citizen Kane.  For any other sane person, it’s got plenty of titties, but little else. 

AKA:  The Acid People.

Most of the principal cast returned for this middling sequel to the truly awesome Desperate Teenage Lovedolls.  This time out, Kitty (Jennifer Schwartz), Patch (Janet Housden) and Alexandria (Kim Pilkington) reform the all girl rock group, The Lovedolls, only to have to elude vengeance seeking family members of people they killed in the first movie.  When their rabid fans start committing Manson style murders in the Lovedolls’ name, the band does away with their ardent admirers by poisoning them with Jim Jones Kool-Aid.

As much as I loved the first film, sitting through this one was something of a chore.  The original’s filmed-on-Super-8mm charm wears out its welcome pretty quickly this time around.  The sequel also sorely lacks the edge of its predecessor, but the biggest problem is the length of the film.  Whereas Desperate Teenage Lovedolls ran a scant 50 minutes and had enough plot for TWO movies, this one clocks in at 80 minutes and features way too many slow spots.  If director David Markey cut a good half hour out of this thing, it might have worked. 

The flick DOES have one great scene in which a crazed fan gets possessed by a killer Gene Simmons doll and assassinates Bruce Springsteen (there’s a great parody of “Dancing in the Dark”).    That scene alone is worth the price of admission, and besides any movie in which The Dead Kennedys’ frontman Jello Biafra plays the president can’t be all that bad. 

I’ve already reviewed this flick before, but seeing how Legend Films was kind enough to send me the all new colorized version of the film, I felt compelled to check it out.  Normally, I can’t stand to see a colorized movie, but Forbidden Zone is so goddamned weird I thought that seeing it in color couldn’t possibly hurt. 

Well it doesn’t make any more sense now that it’s in color, but it definitely is a neat alternative. 

The film always resembled a black and white acid trip version of a Max Fleischer cartoon, now it just seems like a colorized acid trip version of a Max Fleischer cartoon.  There’s still the same amount of frog men, bizarro musical numbers, Monty Python style animation, and frantic dry humping, except now it’s all in color. 

I don’t know, I never “got” this film.  (I’m not even sure if there’s anything to “get" about it.)  If it didn’t try so damn hard to be a cult item, it may have worked, but for me, it’s just weirdness for weirdness sakes.  However, if you’ve always wanted to see Herve (Fantasy Island) Villechaize and Susan (Angel) Tyrrell as the King and Queen of the sixth dimension, then this is your chance!  Easily the best thing about the flick is the awesome theme song by Oingo Boingo (frontman Danny Elfman also appears; which figures because his brother directed it). 

Forbidden Zone is on DVD for the first time in vibrant color from the good folks at Legend Films.  To get your copy today, head on over to www.legendfilms.net.  

Repo Man is a perfect example of a cult movie.  It’s wildly uneven and while it may not be quite up your alley, you can see why people love it so much.  It’s definitely the best punk rockers meet aliens movie ever made.  

Emilio Estevez stars as Otto, a teenage punk who gets a job repossessing cars.  Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) is the seen-it-all repo man who shows Otto the ropes.  When they get wind that there’s a Chevy Malibu driving around town worth $20,000, they try to get their hands on it.  Little do they know that the car is carrying a trunkload of radioactive alien carcasses. 

The second half of the movie is kinda patchy and the ending, although sublimely batshit insane just does not work, but that’s okay because Repo Man features enough random weirdness in it’s 92 minute running time to fill up three movies.  What would you expect from a movie produced by Michael Nesmith?  (At least he’s doing something productive with all of that Monkees money.) 

Estevez is pretty good in an early leading role, but it’s Stanton who steals the movie as the grizzled, cynical Bud.  While the film is crammed with too many annoying side characters, it’s Stanton who always seems to perk things up whenever he’s on the screen.  

Director Alex Cox peppers the flick with a lot of memorable imagery.  The opening scene is pretty awesome and I especially loved the generic food labels that occasionally fill the frame.  Cox (who later went on to direct Sid and Nancy) also has a keen eye for the sights and sounds of the West Coast punk scene (something that was never properly documented) and as a result, the soundtrack is great.  Besides the excellent theme song by Iggy Pop, we also get to see The Circle Jerks perform and hear several other classic punk songs during the course of the movie  (my favorites include the Suicidal Tendencies’ “Intuitionalized” and the Burning Sensations’ “Pablo Picasso”). 

Best line:  “You know how everybody’s into weirdness right now?”

Man-hating Amazon women ride around the jungle using “worthless” men for arrow practice.  The people’s leader and protector is a dude named Dharma (no, not Jenna Elfman) who looks like a cross between King Arthur and Zorro and uses Vegas magician style technology to dupe them into thinking that he’s a God.  After Dharma is mortally wounded by the invading Amazons, he gets his youthful successor to take over his cheesy costume for him (shades of The Phantom).  The new Dharma joins up with two other “Supermen”, a black strongman (whose superpowers include industrial strength burps) and a Chinese kung fu expert/master swordsman to get revenge on those six foot tall dames.

Unfortunately it takes FOREVER for the three “Supermen” to finally join forces.

This is positively one of the most bizarre movies I’ve ever seen.  (That alone is a half-hearted recommendation.)  Medieval Times rejects fighting scantily clad women?  Check.  Guys being folded up and bounced around like human basketballs?  Uh-huh.  Tanks made entirely out of bamboo?  You got it dude.   

Although there is very little here in terms of “quality” entertainment, the movie is so downright ludicrous that’s it’s pretty hard to completely hate.  The constant comic relief is goofy as all get out and really isn’t all that funny, but that shitbox crazy score will stick in your head for days!  The silly feats of superhuman strength are some of the lamest you’ve seen since The Puma Man (lots of reverse motion effects are used so it looks like someone is jumping ONTO a tall building instead of from it), but it kinda adds to the movie’s ramshackle anything goes charm. 

I mean what did you really expect when the Shaw Brothers hire Italian exploitation hack Al (War of the Robots) Bradley to film a batshit insane Supermen vs. Amazon Women movie that goes by at least NINE alternate titles?

The old Dharma gets the best line of the movie:  “No peppers, no protection!”

AKA:  Amazons vs. Supermen.  AKA:  Amazons Against Supermen.  AKA:  Barbarian Revenge.  AKA:  Return of the Barbarian Women.  AKA:  Super Stooges vs. the Amazon Women.  AKA:  Supermen Against the Amazons.  AKA:  Three Fantastic Supermen.  AKA:  Three Stooges vs. The Wonder Women. 

The Gruesome Twosome is somewhat of an unsung classic in goremeister H.G. Lewis’ career.  I mean everyone knows Blood Feast, 2000 Maniacs and The Wizard of Gore, but nobody really bandies around The Gruesome Twosome when talking about Lewis’ films.  I hope to in some way remedy that with this review. 

For starters, this film is the only film on record that begins with two mannequin heads talking to each other in Southern accents.  And they talk for FIVE MINUTES straight, people!  Are you feeling the love I got for this movie yet?

The plot has a little old spinster named Mrs. Pringle (Elizabeth Davis) who runs a wig shop out of her home and lives with her mentally deranged son Rodney (Chris Martell) and their stuffed leopard Napoleon.  Mrs. Pringle has a room for rent and whenever a young co-ed comes to take a look at the room, Rodney scalps them.  The old biddy then sells the scalps as wigs to her unsuspecting customers. 

Okay, I admit there are long stretches of this movie in which NOTHING happens.  I will admit that the heroine of the film totally overdosed on Nancy Drew pills while trying to figure out why all those college girls were disappearing.  I’ll even give you that this flick features some of the worst editing in the history of the medium. 

That being said, The Gruesome Twosome simply has some of the best moments ever captured on film, so to me it’s totally worth it.

Let’s talk gore.  While no means is The Gruesome Twosome in the same league as Blood Feast when it comes to the red stuff, it still has enough scalpings, decapitations and gut ripping to be loads of fun.
 

The acting by the two leads is also pretty stellar.  Martell is nothing short of amazing as the crazy as an outhouse rat Rodney.  Looking at him in this film, you’ll swear he really IS retarded, and his performance is ten times better than Leonardo DiCaprio in that Gilbert Grape movie.  Davis is equally great playing a demented version of the All-American grandmother.  Call me crazy, but every time she talked to her stuffed leopard Napoleon I laughed. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah so what if the movie features long pointless scenes of people walking aimlessly around, I don’t care.  This movie features one of the greatest scenes of all time.  Of course, I’m talking about the inexplicable scene where a bunch of co-eds sitting around in their nighties start go-go dancing for no apparent reason while chowing down on Kentucky Fried Chicken. 

Look, it’s pretty hard to defend The Gruesome Twosome in any way, shape or form.  I admit it’s not a perfect movie.  I admit that the 72 minute running time sometimes seems more like 720.  I admit that you might have to be under the influence of a controlled substance to fully enjoy this movie, but dammit I do love me some Gruesome Twosome.

Let me put it to you this way:  Mannequin heads talking incessantly for five minutes about God knows what?  CLASSIC!  The scene where Rodney has to rip open a girl’s stomach in order to get Napoleon’s fresh liver dinner?  CLASSIC!  Crazy old women talking to stuffed leopards?  CLASSIC!  Random ass go-go dancing complete with gratuitous KFC product placement?  CLASSIC!

The Gruesome Twosome is still Number 7 on The Video Vacuum Top Ten for the great year of 1967, just above Point Blank and resting below Zatoichi Challenged. 

Suggested Drinking Game:  If you take a shot every time Mrs. Pringle talks to her stuffed leopard Napoleon; say hello to Charles Bukowski for me once you reach the great saloon in the sky.  

Montag the Magnificent (Ray Sager) is a crackpot magician who continuously invites a morning talk show host to see his magic act where he cuts a woman in half with a chainsaw, drives a metal spike through a woman’s skull, guides an industrial punch press through a chick’s abdomen and forces two other broads to swallow incredibly sharp swords.  Montag also gives a lot of pompous speeches about the line between reality and dreams and even though he’s really butchering girls on stage, the audience thinks it’s all an illusion.  The girls themselves appear fine until they leave the stage, go out to dinner and mysteriously end up REALLY being sawed in half, have a whole in their head, puking blood, etc.  The talk show host’s cop boyfriend figures it all out, but the reality bending surprise ending confuses the heck out of him, not to mention the audience. 

This is one of director H.G. (Blood Feast) Lewis’ better efforts because it features a terrific gore scene about every ten minutes or so.  Like most of Lewis’ gore movies, whenever someone gets their guts ripped out, Montag plays around with them in lingering close-ups.  (Lewis paid for those chicken livers covered in catsup and by God he’s gonna show ‘em!)  As with a lot of Lewis’ later works, The Wizard of Gore suffers from overlength and excess padding (the police procedural stuff brings things to a dead stop), but whenever Sager is on stage mutilating lovely women, it’s damn good times.

Sager (who later gave up acting and went on to produce all those unrelated Prom Night sequels) is excellent as Montag.  He could’ve looked pretty ridiculous, but he actually imbues Montag with a sense of menace and at times flashes a wicked sense of humor without being obvious or hammy. 

This is just a theory, but I think that this is probably Lewis’ most personal film.  I believe there’s a lot of Lewis in the character of Montag.  Consider the way that Montag chastises his audience’s bloodlust and then lets them revel in it.  Lewis probably had the same mentality while making this flick, but just like Montag, he’s a master showman who really delights in giving the audience for what they want to see; namely blood and gore.  And for that we should be entirely grateful. 

After starring in crap like The Incredible Petrified World, Robert Clarke said, “Hey making a low budget horror movie is easy!” and decided to direct, produce, co-write and star in this uneven atomic age monster flick. 

He found out making a good horror movie isn’t as easy as it looks. 

Clarke plays an alcoholic doctor who accidentally gets hit with a massive dose of radiation.  He shows no immediate signs of being harmed, but whenever he is exposed to the sun’s UV rays, he becomes an ugly scaly monster.  He copes with his dilemma the only way he knows how, which involves drinking mass quantities of alcohol.  

He contemplates suicide, but finds a reason to live in the form of a sexy nightclub singer played by Patricia Manning.  One night they make love on the beach, which makes her gangster boyfriend jealous.  When the thug tries to rough him up in broad daylight, Clarke turns into the hulking monster and goes on a rampage.  He murders a couple of cops, scares some school kids and kills a dog.  In the end, he gets gunned down by the police and plunges from the top of a water tower. 

The Hideous Sun Demon is similar in some ways to The Incredible Melting Man (the hospital scene is almost identical) but isn’t nearly as much fun.  You have to wonder if the esteemed Marvel artist Jack Kirby loved this movie as the creature looks a lot like The Thing from The Fantastic Four and features a lot of similarities to The Incredible Hulk as well.  The make-up effects are rather well done, but as in The Alligator People (which was released the same year), the monster in this movie inexplicably wears a pair of snappy dress pants. 

This would-be cult item has the benefit of a pretty convincing monster and a solid performance by Clarke, but little else.  Despite showing the creature rather early, Clarke doesn’t turn the beast loose into much later in the picture.  Ordinarily this wouldn’t be such a bad thing, but most of the scenes that take place in between the monster’s appearances play like a grade Z soap opera.  It doesn’t help when you have to sit through Manning’s incessant droning on the piano TWICE, which is guaranteed to drive you up the wall.

There’s not much here in the way of fun dialogue, but the headlines do warn:  Weird Killer Still at Large!

Clarke later help spoof the film when it was re-released and redubbed with comic dialogue as What’s Up Hideous Sun Demon?    If some of the music seems familiar, it’s because it later turned up in Night of the Living Dead. 

AKA:  Blood on His Lips.  AKA:  The Sun Demon. 

Every bad movie fan owes it to themselves to check this movie out.  It features one of the WORST monsters ever seen on the silver screen, and if that isn’t a worthwhile recommendation, I don’t know what is. 

Jeff (This Island Earth) Morrow stars as a jet pilot named Mitch who sees a giant bird monster but no one believes him.  When the enormous eagle swallows up a couple pilots, the Army hires Mitch to help kill it.  The first order of business though is to find it’s nest and shoot the creature’s eggs so there aren’t MORE gigantic gulls with titanic talons flying around.  Well, that makes the monster REALLY mad, and it flies into the city and destroys a couple buildings.  Since the monster is covered by an impenetrable force field, the military has to shoot it with “atomic spitballs” in order to kill it; but all they really had to do was cut the clearly visible strings that were keeping the damned thing up. 

You may have seen some crummy looking monsters before, but you ain’t seen nothing unless you’ve seen The Giant Claw.  You’ll have to wait a good half an hour to see the giant bird for yourself, but it’s definitely worth the wait.  It looks like a cross between a demented vulture and an anorexic turkey.  As animatronic avians go, it looks about as lifelike as Big Bird.

The monster effects, though completely retarded looking, will keep you in stitches.  The scene where the bird attacks a group of parachuters and gobbles them up one by one is priceless.  The bird’s other victims include cattle, horses, hot rodding teenagers and one annoying superstitious Mexican.  Trust me you haven’t lived until you see a monster that looks like a drunken piñata swoop down from the sky to scarf down on an illegal immigrant. 

Speaking of bad models being held up by strings, the airplanes in this movie also look like they came directly from the dime store.  All you’ll be able to think about during the scenes where the planes duke it out with the monster is “Oh my God, I hope their strings don’t get tangled up!”  There’s also a hilarious effect of the spinning Earth that looks like a painted beach ball tossed in for good measure too.  

Every time the goofy looking monster shows up, it’s damn good times, but unfortunately everything involving Morrow and the lamebrain scientists is boring as all get out.  The movie is also padded with tons of stock footage and gratuitous narration (“It was a feathered nightmare with wings!”) that will make you want to pull your hair out.  The scenes of the phony flamingo are pretty great, but ultimately there are way too many laborious scenes involving humans with the personalities of unupholstered furniture that get in the way of the fun.

Producer Sam Katzman saved a LOT of money on the effects in this one by hiring a bunch of Mexicans to create the infamous monster.  Maybe if he let THEM direct the picture instead of Fred F. (The Werewolf) Sears, it could have been a laugh a minute classic, instead of a sporadically amusing cult item. 

Even though Katzman cut corners on the budget, some of the dialogue is worth a million bucks. 

Like when Morrow showcases his doubts about his plan for killing the monster:  “It’s one of those cockeyed concepts that you pull down from Cloud Eight somewhere in sheer desperation!”

Or how about when one of the fighter pilots does battle with the oversized ostrich and says:  “Yow!  Holy Toledo!  I’ve seen some mighty big chicken hawks back on the farm, but man, this baby takes the cake!  Honest to God, I’ll never call my mother in law an old crow again!”

But it’s a random puzzled scientist that gets the movie’s best line:  “That bird is extra-terrestrial.  It comes from outer space from some God forsaken, anti-matter galaxy millions and millions of light years from the Earth.  No other explanation is possible.”