MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 7

For the seventh day of this week of thrills and excitement we have two more fine films from the Churubusco-Azteca studios especially for the ladies:

Espiritismo (1962) is a domestic melodrama with a devilish twist.  Mom and Dad are just celebrating their big anniversary and are extra happy because the mortgage on the house is finally  paid off, and they feel they can ignore the dire warnings they got at that Ouija board party they went to the week before.  Along comes junior who needs eight grand to start a crop dusting business and if they loved him they would mortgage the house again.  Things don't seem to be working out after that and they are going to lose the house unless drastic actions are taken, so it seems like the natural thing to do is join a spiritualist cult and call upon the dark forces for aid.  This takes the form of an emissary from the devil bringing Pandora's Box which, as you recall, contains a Crawling Hand that grants you your desires. Mom runs the show here, always puffing on a cig and ranting, and poor Dad can only tag along and watch the world fall apart. How it all turns out isn't too surprising.  This is kind of slow and talky and is intended to appeal primarily to the housewife of those days, but it keeps a steady pace of mysterious events leading up to the inescapable conclusion that she shouldn'ta done that thing.

That's Pandora's box on the table between them but the cool thing is the shadow of the lamp on the wall behind her.  I have this thing about seeing the shadow of something that should actually be emitting light.  It's crazy, I know.  I'm just nuts about lighting.  Look how they hit that chair in the background to establish that the space goes all the way back there.

I found it interesting from a sociological standpoint; the attitudes expressed by the characters regarding their social standing and economic security, with The House being the big thing in their lives which keeping or losing meant their happiness and survival.  Which may not be the way you want your horror movie to come across.  This was a K. Gordon Murray release, dubbed in Florida by Floridians for the edification of the English speaking world, and it is the first time I have ever heard the narrator of a movie or anyone else use the word "quelch."  Apparently the aim of this movie is to quelch our desire to get involved with Ouija boards and summoning the spirits of the dead.  WELL IT DIDN'T WORK.

El maldicion de la Llorona (1963) a.k.a. Curse of the Crying Woman, is a real rip-snorter.  You never know what is going to happen next.  It's a multigenerational family curse story, the curse of an ancestor who made a deal with the devil to gain youth and power, with the catch being that to keep her youth and power she had to keep committing the most terrible crimes she could.  This didn't go down well with the community.  Most families don't keep the spear-transfixed skeleton of their most evil ancestor in the basement awaiting the day the youngest member of the clan turns 25 and pulls out the spear to bring her back to life, but this one does.  And guess what.  Home comes the young niece of the family who is exactly 24 and 364/365ths years old.  All kinds of crazy stuff happens then.  The aunt comes flying into the basement like a hideous skeleton and gets these empty eye sockets sometimes, and she's got no reflection and the niece loses her reflection the closer it gets to the fatal hour and the uncle they said was dead is actually a half human beast chained up in the bell tower but he GETS OUT when the club-footed scar-faced lackey goes up there to give him a GOOD BEATING, the dogs are let out to KILL POLICEMEN, and MIDNIGHT IS FAST APPROACHING.  It's one nutty thing after another, and it all takes place in one night of terror.

You can see they light the hell out of everything and it all looks really great and spooky.  They don't spare the horrors and rats and cobwebs and groping hands and sudden shocks.  What's funny is that when they do the flashback explanation of the origin of the family curse they show it all in negative and a bunch of the scenes they use are a nonsensical jumble of shots from El mundo de los vampiros.  I thought it was funny anyway.  Oh yeah, the niece has a husband too but the great thing is he spends most of the movie in peril and really only gets useful when it comes to the climactic scenes when someone is needed to brawl with the club-footed scar-faced lackey.  It's all about the ladies here and it's great.  Rita Macedo as Aunt Selma is creepy as hell, always seeming weirdly elated over her evil power and not hesitating to do whatever she needs to do to achieve her wicked goals.

This concludes our week of holiday cheer and I wish you and yours all the joys of this wonderful Halloween season.  Just be careful who wears the pants in the family, that's all.

MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 5

Mexico - in the late '60s it was where old monsters went to die. 

Fear Chamber (1969) was one of a batch of bargain basement movies Boris Karloff was lured south of the border to make for the sake of a paycheck - legend has it that paycheck was found uncashed among his effects after his death.  I am sure the circumstances of the making of those films and their posthumous release has been well documented, if you care.  I have seen one of the others, Snake People, and was surprised that this was not quite as dreadful as I had anticipated but still it is a disgrace in many ways.  Karloff's character takes to a sick-bed part way through the movie and doesn't appear again until the very end to clean things up, but a good bit of his dialog throughout is delivered into a telephone while others carry on the action of the story - if you can call it a story.  It seems he had discovered a type of subterreanean mineral intelligence by aiming some kind of atomic telescope at the earth's core, which fact is revealed near the end of the movie, in a dream sequence.  That shows just how broken up and inept the plot, script and overall execution of this thing is.  They don't seem to be able to shoot a scene in a way that you can tell what is happening, or in many cases so you can even tell what it is you are looking at.  Perhaps they realized that the rock monster was so stupid looking they should not give it one clearly visible shot but instead shoot only blurry closeups of some lumpy thing twitching around with smoke and colored lights.  Did I mention that to stay alive it needs a substance which is only formed in a human body in a state of terror?  A female human body?  That explains why they have to lure women into a spook house dungeon and torment them for a while before sucking out their blood for the monster rock.  Luckily it grows an elephant trunk after a while which it can grab them with and suck their blood out, making the spook house and its associated henchmen unnecessary.  I will give them one thing, the lab set looks pretty good.

 

 That blurry thing there is a representative shot of the monster.  The print I acquired also included a scene of gratuitous nudity deleted from the general release, and believe me even a little gratuitous nudity can really pep up something this badly made.

Pacto diabolico (1969) is an unconvincing costume effort inspired by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  There isn't all that much you can do with that story.  You know eventually there is going to be a hairy-handed strangler involved, no matter what else happens.  John Carradine plays a former colleague of Jekyll who hopes to alter the transformation technique to create an elixir of youth and it does transform him into a younger Mexican actor, relieving him of some responsibility for how this turns out.  The essential ingredient of this elixir is just what you would expect - the eyes cut out of women's heads. Their eyes. Once again the magic of transformation baffles me, as Carradine's facial hair disappears with his wrinkles and reappears when the serum wears off.  At least it doesn't transform his clothes. I watched him very carefully, and it appears Carradine delivered his lines in Spanish, but apparently it wasn't good enough so he was dubbed.  Maybe there is an English print, I don't really care, but he does have one deranged line that I would enjoy hearing in his own lushly stentorian tones. This movie is meant as a period piece of a vaguely nineteenth century nature, and filmed mostly on cheap little sets that look just like cheap little sets and nothing more.  They are brightly lit from above whether people are carrying a candelabra around or not.  Fortunately there was a brief moment of gratuitous nudity, enough to give me hope that there might be another, which gave me the strength to endure the chasing and brawling that results when a hairy handed strangler goes after a young woman with a fiancee.  For some reason the primary young woman in the movie is the daughter of Dr. Jekyll.  That made me hope it might end up being a Daughter of Dr. Jekyll thing and that she might transform too, but no.  

See how hairy that hand is?  It will soon be strangling.  And see how crummy looking that set is?  And see how lousy the print is? I had to tweak these images in a graphics program just to make them decipherable to you, which shows what a great guy I am.  What you can't see here is the most horrible thing about the movie - the soundtrack.  The opening credits are backed with a horrendous continuous random piano noodling and organ pounding and I thought, "My god, what am I going to have to endure?"  The more exciting things were supposed to be the more random and horrific the background noise became.  Worst of all were the laboratory scenes - even though there were no electronics of any kind the lab scenes were overlaid with a continuous wooping and bleeping noise meant to indicate apparatus I suppose.  Four seconds worth.  The same stupid and absolutely inappropriate noises repeating every four seconds the whole time anyone was in the laboratory. 

I tell you, these two were pretty rough to make it through and I am going try to watch better things for the rest of this exercise because fun is fun but this ain't it.

MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 4

I figured I had better do some double features if I want to get all these things watched by Halloween so here we go with a Cowboys vs. Monsters double feature:

El charro de las Calaveras (1965) a.k.a. The Rider of the Skulls looks like it was meant as a pilot and two episodes of a kids' TV show, but judging by the online evidence of posters and lobby cards it was released as a movie.  The Charro was orphaned when his parents were killed by bandits and he dedicated his life to Justice, remaining anonymous and masked because Justice is faceless. I'd like to point out though that recent history has shown that being masked or anonymous does not make you automatically Just.  Sometimes it only makes you one of the monsters.  Social commentary aside, in the first episode the Charro confronts a werewolf which has a transformation style I have never seen before - the guy falls in a faint and his fully clothed body fades into a naked skeleton, then back into a fully clothed werewolf.  I have never understood the supernatural influence on attire and the way clothing tends to transform with the body.  In defeating the lobo humano the Charro acquires a cowardly and foolish sidekick, and an orphan boy.  In the second episode the Charro's costume undergoes significant changes, and the boy is replaced by a different boy but the cowardly foolish sidekick remains the same.  They go on to encounter two more episodes, a vampire and a headless horseman, both of whom are among the lousiest looking monsters I have yet seen. I hate to stigmatize an entire people but in general Mexican movie monster makeup and masks are terrible.

 

Charro Mk. 1 meets the Old Witch in the abandoned cemetery:

Skull and crossbone logos on arms and back, cloth face mask.

 

Crummy looking vampire.

 

Charro Mk 2 - logos on chest and plain skull on back, full head mask

 

Idiotic looking headless horseman head in box.

The monsters are intentionally not very scary because this is standard kids' show stuff - chase around, fight the monster, happy ending.  What interested me was the rural settings and decaying brick farm architecture of the locations where all the chasing and brawling was filmed.  Scholars of the Cinema should note that it was directed by El maestro de los Monstruos, Alfredo Salazar, who as writer created the most outrageous monsters of the Mexican cinema.  Name a famous Mexican monster or masked wrestler movie and chances are, Salazar wrote it. As director, maybe not so good.

El grito de la muerte (1959) was renamed The Living Coffin for its U.S. release, but there are more screams of death than there are living coffins in it.  There are strange doings on the old rancho, with a murderous Crying Ghost weeping over the deaths of her children in the quicksand swamp and clawing up the faces of her victims, and it has something to do with a fortune in gold.  Luckily along comes Gaston Santos, Cowboy Detective, and his stupid lazy sidekick Crazy Coyote - the same sidekick known as Squirrel Eyes in Swamp of the Lost Monsters, but wearing a coonskin cap this time.  The dancing horse doesn't do any dancing in this one but it does pull Gaston out of the quicksand and show him where the secret panel is that the ghost comes out of.  Swamp of the Lost Monsters was mostly filmed in rural locations, but except when Gaston is riding around the countryside or falling in the quicksand this is filmed in the gloomy arched sets of Churubusco Azteca.  In fact the street scene set looks like a rusticated and expanded version of the one in The Monstrous Doctor Crime:

I don't know if it is just the fading of the Eastmancolor print or they couldn't afford to light the sets or what, but even the courtyard of the rancho is wrapped in gloom at the triumphant finale with Crazy Coyote yawning on his horse:

When Gaston Santos takes a hand in things you know there aren't really any monsters, just criminals in monster suits, and everything will turn out okay after a lot of chasing around and brawling.   So, nothing really exciting here but I got these out of the way at least.

MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 2

My reward for surviving the Attack of the Deadly Migraine Pill seems to be a perpetual low grade headache but in spite of that and other inevitable miseries of life here is more of the distracting triviality of Mexican Halloween 2012.

Swamp of the Lost Monsters (1957) a.k.a. El pantano de las ánimas, is one of the films brought to the U.S. by producer K. Gordon Murray and dubbed for the matinee market.  When a body vanishes from its coffin after being boated through the Haunted Swamp and a murderous fish-man begins dragging hapless campesinos to a watery doom, it's time to call in Gaston Santos, Cowboy Detective on his dancing horse, and his voluble comedic sidekick Squirrel Eyes.  There are mysterious doings on the old rancho, with plotters scheming via secret telegraphy, and it has something to do with a million dollars in life insurance.  There really isn't much movie in this movie, with lots of riding around, miscellaneous brawling, and some irrelevant fiesta footage filling it out.  It's aimless, meaningless, not in the least compelling and the only thing worth seeing unless you love the sight of a guy making a horse prance backward is the crazy fish man suit.  Though the waters of the haunted swamp are uniformly cocoa colored from above, once you are under water they are as crystal clear as a studio tank, as you can see,

The one unique experience this film provides is the opportunity to see a man in a fish man costume operating a telegraph key.  I actually took a couple of breaks to go watch baseball with my wife - that is how unthrilling Swamp of the Lost Monsters is.  It creates an eerie mood for about two minutes and from then on it's just stuff happening but not interesting stuff, just stuff.  So pray for me, that this headache will go away in a week or so.

MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART ONE

Having determined to regale my small but sporadic readership with my experiences in enjoying a week of thrills from South of the Border, I promptly disabled myself in the middle of the first movie with a medical error.  I took a migraine pill the wrong way at the wrong time and put myself down for about five hours after the damnedest physical reaction I have ever had.  However I pulled through and here I am to do my duty.

Il mostruoso dottor Crimen (1952) a.k.a The Revived Monster, is said to be Mexico's first Mad Doctor movie.  [Addendum: the correct Spanish title is El monstruo resuscitado - I was watching an Italian print of the film with dual Italian/Spanish audio and English subtitles.] A jaded journalist answers an enigmatic advertisement which leads her into the bizarre domain of a masked doctor in his gloomy mansion between the cemetery and the sea.  His hideous countenance and social rejection drove him to become a renowned plastic surgeon and amateur sculptor of waxen beauties, but naturally his inner conflicts and isolation from humanity have deranged him.  

She becomes the first person ever to show him kindness or encouragement, inducing him to unmask, but when he learns that her true motivation is to get a great story he contrives a convoluted revenge.  This involves the inexplicable revivification of a handsome corpse by somehow transferring into it the life force of the beast-man he keeps caged in the basement, the resulting revenant being operated by the remote power of his insane mind.  This is really a gothic melodrama with plenty of appeal for the ladies - a strong independent female falling into a relationship with a pitiable but creative soul who ultimately becomes too crazy to endure.  How many times has that happened to you?  It happens here every day. 

This was filmed at the Churubusco Azteca studios, the RKO of Mexico, on a couple of very nice elaborate interior sets and some strange little exterior ones the size of a garage with a rear projection screen at the end showing the sea or the city.  It is a realm of endless night and one thing I love about these Mexican horror movies is their dark beauty.  The scenes are often staged with a truly artistic eye for lighting and the striking forms of arches and silhouettes, as these images reveal:

Despite its thrifty and slightly primitive origin it achieves a powerful mood and its melodramatic and sentimental nature becomes quite affecting.  Its formulas and cliches are not of the Mad Doctor variety, but more of the Doomed Romance style of older horror films, the pathetic situation of a gifted man who is too ugly and crazy to live, and an endangered woman whose error was in showing kindness to someone too poorly socialized to understand it.   

YES, it's the hideous story of my OWN TERRIBLE LIFE!!!!

Movies

Gangway for Tomorrow (1943)  Extremely entertaining feelgood wartime propaganda piece - a carful of ridesharing war workers on the way to a day's work at the airplane plant recall in turn the past events that led them to where they are.  Not a big or flashy movie, but a set of interesting human stories.  Written by radio suspense-master Arch Oboler, very well produced and directed.  Good clean fun.  8/10

Attack the Block (2011) A gang of teenage hoodlums are interrupted in mid-crime by an alien invasion.  The problem is, they are the ones who have what the monsters want.  A pure, sharp, clean, witty and intense monster movie without a lot of fancy-ass jerkycam CGI spectacle.  A good monster movie is about people, and this story is populated by believable and eventually likeable characters, fighting guys in monster suits.  That's right, monster suits.  Not some motion capture glittery tentacled slime-dripping whooshing ray-emitting crap, but guys in big black fur suits and it totally works. Just enough woah moments and sudden grim laughs; not too grisly but the right amount to show you those gorilla-wolf motherfuckers mean business.  This is the best pure monster movie I can recall seeing in years and I don't give 10/10 easily or often but this earns it. Nice job, everybody.

This is all you need to know.

Movies

The She-Creature (1956) Hypnotic-regression monster movie inspired by the Bridey Murphy craze. I expected more of a direct girl-to-monster transformation like that one where the woman turned into a gorilla, but this is some kind of manifestation of a soul, kind of thing. Directed by Edward L. Cahn, and written by Lou Rusoff, its badfilm pedigree is impeccable. Not extremely compelling or surprising except for how the ancient fishlike sea monster has long hair and big irrelevant boobs to show it is a female. Entertaining dialog at some points. Harmless. 5/10

Movies

Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare (1968) Ancient Babylonian demon awakens and goes to Japan where he faces off against the legions of Japanese Apparitions. It's a monster suit movie, with the monsters being traditional grotesque spooks; the protagonist is a Kappa, or water imp, who calls upon creatures like the one-legged cyclops umbrella with the huge licking tongue (actually a big marionette) the beautiful girl with a hideous face on the back of her head, dwarf with giant stone head, squeaking mushroom blob, snake neck woman, etc. Completely nuts except for the incredibly tedious human plot elements in between the monster suit fight scenes. There is a definite nationalist angle in this as in much of Japanese culture, with emphasis placed on the supremacy of the Japanese Apparitions over the foreign invader. First of three such Yokai Monsters films. 6/10

Lake of the Dead (1958) Norwegian psychological thriller that plays with levels of reality in a weird way. A writer reads to his wife from the manuscript of his new novel about a group of people staying at a cabin by a lake said to be haunted by the ghost of a one-legged axe murderer - one night a year you can hear his screams and that is just three nights away. They find and read aloud from a dream journal, and there is uncertainty about whose dreams they are. Hypnosis and telepathic dream-sharing are also involved. What really threw me was that I kept remembering it was just a guy reading a story to his wife, and they never resolve that at the end. Kind of talky, but it's filmed with a sort of cautious staging that makes it seem more fantasy than reality. Really more like a 1940s American b-movie with a more precise presentation. I can't tell if they meant it to be as much of a proto-ironic exercise as it appears. Kind of long to sit through. 4/10

On the Buses (1971) Movie cash-in based on hugely popular British sit-com about bus drivers. Crude low humor throughout, with lewd innuendo, snide cruel asides, and juvenile pranks. It's really an extension of schoolboy humor with the lads standing around cackling over the absurd predicament they've gotten their inspector into, scheming up pranks and drooling over cleavage. The situation in this case is that female bus drivers have been introduced, leading to various other situations occurring. This is an anthropological exercise for me - I see how certain types would find this amusing but it is pretty dreadful to a thinking person. British comedies of this sort have a far stronger anti-authoritarian and class-conflict angle to them than their U.S. counterparts, there is no effort made to heal the rift and strive for co-operation which would be the lesson here. The closest American sitcom to this is Hogan's Heroes - the authority figures are the enemy to be fooled and humiliated. I have two more of them to watch, having rashly downloaded the set. 3/10

Movies

Garuda (2004) I thought a Thai monster movie might be interesting but I was wrong. The intense mediocrity of every part of the production was startling. Every shot is made unconvincing by identically formulaic horizontal lighting which has no relation to situation or circumstances - yellow light from the front quarter, blue-white backlight on the other side. No actors were involved, just one college age girl and a lot of macho poseurs who look like gay underwear models. Looks like one of the cheaper U.S. TV crime shows where they stand around a table with a light inside it looking at a bone, only for fourteen year old boys. Sixteen year old boys would have required the girl to at least get wet. Plot consisted entirely of cliches treated as if they were major emotional moments. Mid-sized CG flying monster. Half an hour was all I could watch. 1/10 for educational value only.

Movies

The Brain Eaters (1958) Short, concise, no-budget Brain Parasite film. A little bit of imaginative staging and direction, and some genuinely bizarre and creative plot elements. A large spiral cone of impenetrable metal appears, from which come the Brain Parasites that stick their prongs in your neck and drive you around like a volkswagen. If you try to take them off they inject acid into your spinal cord that dissolves your nerves so once you are caught you're screwed. But they are NOT from outer space. Leonard Nemoy (sic) is nearly unrecognizable in cowl and flowing white beard but his unmistakable voice speaks the will of the group mind. Clear allegory of the cold war fear of invasion, brainwashing, and loss of individuality. Really quite good for what they had to work with. 7/10

Movies

Trog (1970) Joan Crawford's last film - a nonsensical missing link tale. What really impressed me was how clear it was that she was the best actor in the film. She handed a wind-up doll to a guy in a gorilla mask with the same sincerity that she would have put into Lady Macbeth washing the blood off her hands. I was also delighted with how bizarre the story got - after showing the zillion-year-old troglodyte a slide show of dinosaur bones he goes into a great stop-motion dinosaur flashback which somehow gives him the ability to squeak out a few vague words. Michael Gough really gnaws the hell out of the scenery as the Reactionary Opponent of science and reason. 8/10 for Crawford - a pro to the end, 3/10 for the rest of it.

Graffiti Bridge (1990) Prince's sequel to Purple Rain, written by Prince, directed by Prince, starring Prince, music by Prince. It's a Prince movie. Kind of idiotic to the point of near-greatness. So pompous and inane it's almost pretty cool. I always liked Morris Day and The Time better than Prince, and they nearly penetrate my hard outer shell of a thousand generations of White Man to find the tiny flake of Funk hidden deep within. Lots of bright colors and drifting smoke, filmed mostly on a big street corner soundstage set that looks like a trenchcoat cyborg is just about to start shooting it up with his big metal arm-gun, striking sparks off every whirling ventilation fan in sight. Not as lame as Under the Cherry Moon, but then what is? Prince proves that it takes a real man to look totally gay. Really makes me want to see Good Times, the Sonny and Cher movie, again. 6/10

Movies

Children of the Damned (1964) Disconnected sequel to Village of the Damned, a more thoughtful contemporary political allegory. It loses much of the power and clarity of the original by adding moral ambiguity, and sympathy for the powerful mutant children. Strangely, it doesn't try to make any kind of connection with the story of the previous film. Though it suffers by comparison it is still fairly good on its own. 6/10

Movies

Les Maitres du Temps (1982) Animated Space Fantasy from Rene Laloux (La Planete Sauvage) and Moebius. Character animation is flat and thin, not making the transition from Moebius' drawing board to the hands of Hungarian animators very well. What might have been otherworldly or stylized only comes out harsh and unappealing. The backgrounds are the best part of most of this but it suddenly, like the aimless plot, comes together in the last ten minutes and becomes pretty good. Glad I saw it just to see it, but can't recommend it. 4/10

Mobile Police Patlabor the movie (1989) For a giant robot cartoon there sure wasn't enough giant robot. 80% is people talking to each other and walking around in their civvies trying to solve the mystery. 3/10

Island of Terror (1966) Genetics lab on isolated British island inadvertently creates invulnerable blobmonsters that suck your bones out and divide every six hours. SUCK YOUR BONES OUT I SAID! Very nice use of noodles in the reproductive scenes - I like when they use food to make the monster. Peter Cushing's magnificent hairline is the real star of this, like Day of the Triffids and Night of the Big Heat, classic example of the "reductive insularity" motif in British fantasy/horror. They live on an island so they take everything and put it onto a smaller island and it's like a microcosm. Lots of guys just going around doing stuff, then some monster stuff, then more guys driving around and going back the place they were before again. One cute girl per island, and she is only there to sob about how scared she is, and get ordered around by her scientist boyfriend. One of those movies I used to watch on TV because it was better than not having a monster movie to watch. Won't thrill or kill you. 5/10

Movies

An Old, Old Story (1968) and The Singing, Ringing Tree (1957) - two fairy tale movies about the difficulties involved in wooing arrogant bad-tempered princesses, both presented as colorfully and unrealistically as possible, filmed entirely on fantastical and often surrealistic soundstages. The former and more recent is Russian and presents the story as a puppeteer's dream, based on the classic fairy tale of the Magic Tinderbox. It tends more toward the stage musical, with half a dozen song and dance numbers which are competent but not thrilling, and its Soviet ideology is clear in the unflattering depiction of royalty, and the victory of the proletarian hero. The latter and older is German and tells a fairy tale I had never before encountered but which contained many familiar motifs involving magical bargains. In this case the princess must be deprived of all her luxuries before she confronts the flaws of her own character and regains her beauty. By far my favorite of the two, it is filmed in Agfacolor which, at its best, provides intense pure colors that thrill the eye. The sets are huge and elaborate, and the magical transformations are splendid. The one oddity is that it is not dubbed into english, simply given an english over-narration, but it becomes acceptable quite rapidly. Rating: 6/10 and 8/10 respectively.

Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962) Fairly high concept for such an economical production - space explorers of the 21st century landing on Uranus (ha ha, I know, it's like a butthole only it's a planet) encounter a telepathic being that uses their memories and desires to captivate and control them. Most of their desires involve the pastoral scenes of their youth and women in negligee. I had a love-hate relationship with this as a lad, seeing it three or four times on TV and never really knowing if I liked it or not. I enjoyed it a bit more now that my own desires more closely parallel those of the protagonists. I appreciate the technical details of the production too, and appreciate what went into it. There is a stop-motion one-eyed ratosaur, a giant cave spider attack, and the telepathic monster itself appears in a number of different guises - including a large glowing brain, and most delightfully to me a literal piece of tripe with a fake eye stuck in it! GENIUS! A little tedious, but at times there are lots of bright colors and moving shapes which counts for a lot. 6/10

The Astounding Tripe Monster!!!