HubrisWeen 2016, Day 23: War of The Gargantuas (1966)

It's pretty amazing how many sequels could be described as a straight-up remake of the first movie, but you don't realize it until you watch them multiple times. Usually it's pretty obvious when a sequel takes such an obvious route, but sometimes the change are subtle or drastic enough that you don't really catch it.

For instance, James Cameron effectively did this twice: Aliens and Terminator II: Judgment Day take the basic plot of the first film and dial the elements up to more extreme levels. You probably think I sound like one of those annoying fan theory articles or something from CinemaSins, but really consider it for a moment and you'll see that I'm right.

That is not a knock on either film, however. Sometimes more of the same actually works out beautifully, which brings us to today's film. Based on the English title you wouldn't know it and the plot doesn't actually make it all that clear, either, but this is a sequel to Frankenstein Conquers The World.

Confused? Well, you'll probably still be when I describe the film to you, but maybe slightly less so.

Despite not using it in the Japanese ending of the film, either Ishiro Honda or Eiji Tsuburaya must have been very attached to the giant octopus prop that was supposed to drag Frankenstein to his doom. I say that because this film opens with the poor creature being given a second chance at stardom. A fishing boat is caught in a storm off the coast of Japan, and as the lone crewman (Ren Yamamoto) manning the helm tries to find a way through the storm the door behind him opens and an octopus tentacle reaches through it. When the crewman sees the tentacle he grabs the nearest axe and chops it up before throwing his weight against the door. This means he doesn't see the rest of the octopus rising up out of the water and reaching into the wheelhouse windows to grab him.

If only he'd listened to the Ominous Harpsichord!

As the sailor tries not to be dragged out the window by the octopus, he screams out for his fellow crew to help him. However, suddenly the octopus loosens its grip and drops the sailor. When he peers out of the window to see why, he is greeted by a shocking sight: the octopus is engsged in combat with a hairy green giant. In the Japanese film, this creature is named Gaira and in the English version he'll be called Green Gargantua, so I'm going to call him Gaira.

Gaira eventually tosses the octopus aside and it flees. Except, well, Gaira isn't there to save the ship. He just fought off the octopus because he wanted the boat and its crew to himself, so he immediately grabs it and deliberately sinks it.

"ALL MINE!"

Luckily for the sailor, he survives the sinking. Unluckily, well, the police kind of think he's making up his story to hide what really happened--especially since they believe he was part of a crew of smugglers. It's understandable that they're skeptical. After all, in the English version he's claiming his boat was sunk by a Gargantua and in the Japanese version, he claims it was Frankenstein.

Yes, that is the connection to Frankenstein Conquers The World in this film and it's immediately easy to see why the English version ignored the fact it was a sequel at all, because there's not really any clear connection to the earlier film beyond the Gargantuas having the same regenerative powers as Frankenstein. Hell, based on what we'll see later I'm not even 100% sure this wasn't intended as more of a remake than a sequel.

At any rate, when the press gets wind of a boat being sunk by a Gargantua, well, they obviously call up Dr. Paul Stewart (Russ Tamblyn) and his assistant, Akemi Togawa (Kumi Mizuno!), since they famously had a young Gargantua in captivity five years earlier. Stewart is dismissive of the claim of a Gargantua attack at first, for several good reasons, but the Japanese version delightfully renders his response to the press as:

[Subtitle: "Frankenstein cannot be found in the ocean. Goodbye."]

The best part is he's not correct.

Well, Stewart goes to visit the sailor in the hospital anyway and hears his incredible story, which we see in flashback. He and the rest of his crew swam desperately for shore after the sinking, but Gaira saw them and swam after them. Naturally, the huge beast quickly overtook them and grabbed up all the sailors except the lone survivor--and devoured them. The sailor points out a very profound truth: if he were lying, wouldn't he make up a more believable story? Well, he must feel pretty vindicated when police divers shortly recover clothes that belonged to the boat's crew scattered between the wreck and the shore, and all of them sure look like they've been chewed up and spit out.

Incidentally, the crew of that boat had fantastically awful luck, as we're told the ship sank only a few hundred meters from shore--and somehow they drew the wrath of a giant octopus and a Frankenstein monster.

At a press conference, Stewart, Akemi, and their associate Dr. Yuzo Majida (Kenji Sahara!) relate their experiences with the young Gargantua, which we see in flashback. You might think maybe this is going to be Frankenstein from the previous film and the hand somehow became Gaira, but you'd be mistaken. No, they really had a small furry humanoid that liked to play with Akemi's purse and enjoy what I think are milk bottles. Akemi asserts the young creature was gentle and could never have been responsible for such a horrific attack, even after he escaped into the mountains. Stewart agrees, but swears to keep investigating--especially since footprints were recently found in the Japanese Alps and surely the Gargantua could not be in two places at once.

Did anyone really want a Teen Wolf prequel?

However, a fishing boat snags something in their line and when the old fisherman looks into the water, he sees Gaira reaching up for him--and then both he and the other fisherman fall in. On shore, dozens of villagers try to pull their nets in but something in the water is so strong it begins to pull them in--and then suddenly Gaira rises from the water, bellowing at them. They waste no time in fleeing, even though the beast does not come ashore.

Akemi still refuses to believe the story, but Majida goes to investigate and finds something stuck to the hull of the fishing boat attacked by Gaira--a chunk of tissue. Under analysis, it's determined that it definitely belongs to a sea creature, but that doesn't rule out the possibility of some kind of mutation. Meanwhile, Akemi and Stewart find that the prints in the mountains are unmistakably those of a gigantic humanoid.

However, any question about Gaira being real is rendered moot when the beast comes ashore at an airport. The creature is about 75 feet tall and proceeds to cause a massive panic, before walking up to one of the airport buildings, seeing a woman who didn't get away from the windows in time, and smashing his way in to grab her. Unfortunately for her, this is not a King Kong situation and Gaira immediately shoves her into his mouth, then spits her chewed up dress out onto the ground.

"I should really quit eating these, but once you pop you can't stop."

Well, just too late to help her, the sun comes out from behind the heavy cloud cover. Gaira reacts to the sunlight like a hungover college kid and bolts for the ocean at a dead run. Majida arrives at the airport in time to watch Gaira leap into the ocean through binoculars.

The press gives Stewart, Akemi, and Majida a not entirely unjustified tongue lashing for this since maybe if they hadn't insisted that Gaira was not a threat the attack could have been avoided. Stewart advises that they accept the truth and the important thing is to formulate ideas about how to stop Gaira. He recommends that the creature's aversion to sunlight is helpful because they can use bright lights in populated areas to keep him from attacking.

Well, a party boat in Tokyo harbor apparently ignored get the memo because as a lounge singer (Kipp Hamilton) warbles the unforgettable tune "The Words Get Stuck In My Throat"--no really, good luck forgetting it--they dim the lights. As she takes her bows at the end of the song, Gaira promptly advances on the boat, presumably because the song harmed his ears as much as ours, and scoops the singer up. However, he does not get the chance to get her stuck in his throat because the boat lights are turned up to full and he drops her. We never do find out if she survived the fall back onto the deck.

Gaira then comes ashore, but with all the lights in Tokyo at full brightness he is driven into the countryside. The JSDF use bonfires and bright lights to try and herd Gaira away from villages and farms, but their tanks and other artillery just piss him off. One such offensive just results in Gaira picking up tanks and flinging them into houses. However, the JSDF then debuts the fan favorite Maser tanks to use against Gaira.

Look, if the Pentagon were developing Maser tanks I might not mind our bloated defense budget.

They use helicopters to lure him to a river, where the Maser cannons can shoot him. And this proves to be the one and only time the Masers were ever effective against a kaiju as they hurt Gaira a lot. After chasing him through the woods with strafing beams, he is driven to what he thinks is the safety of a river.

Surprise, motherfucker, the river has been electrified! Additionally, smaller laser projectors have been placed at shin height and they hurt him even worse. Between the electricity, the Masers, and the lasers, Gaira is quickly dying. It looks like the JSDF has finally managed to take out a kaiju with their hardware directly...

...until a roar echoes out of the mountains and the Brown Gargantua, or Sanda, charges to Gaira's rescue. Sanda is taller than his "brother" at 90 feet, and he quickly knocks out the electrodes feeding into the river. He helps Gaira up, roars at the military and waves them off, before helping Gaira into the woods and they both disappear.

"Only I get to beat up on my little brother!"

Well, Stewart and Akemi are sure that Sanda must be their little Gargantua all grown up and Stewart hypothesizes that Sanda must have somehow injured himself in a way that caused a chunk of his tissue to wash out to sea and grow into Gaira, adapting to the aquatic environment as he matured. Of course, this means the military plan to bomb the Gargantuas to smithereens as soon as they're relocated is the worst possible idea because the pieces could regenerate into thousands of Gargantuas--and they may take more after Gaira than Sanda.

Stewart and Akemi think they know where the creatures are hiding, at a nearby lake, and they prove to be right when they almost walk right into Gaira during a heavy fog. As they flee, Akemi falls off a cliff and hangs for her life from a tree branch--and before Stewart can get to her, Sanda appears and despite taking a boulder to the leg, he saves Akemi's life. This proves that Sanda is still a gentle creature and must be helping his malevolent sibling because he doesn't know the truth.

However, when Sanda finds Gaira napping off the couple he just plucked out of their romantic rowboat and devoured, next to their chewed clothes, he realizes what Gaira has done. And plucking a tree from the ground, he strikes Gaira with it in a fury. Gaira fights back but it's a brief scuffle before he decides to retreat to the ocean again, running right through the middle of multiple towns.

Unfortunately, Gaira soon comes ashore in Tokyo and Stewart realizes that the beast now associates light with easy food. Luckily for humanity, Sanda isn't done with Gaira and the two confront each other in Tokyo, and after Gaira almost eats Akemi before Sanda comes to her rescue, well, that's the last straw. Nobody hurts Sanda's mother figure and gets away with it...

"BOAT FIGHT!"

Don't get me wrong, I love Frankenstein Conquers The World, but I have to say that War of the Gargantuas takes the same basic story and makes some drastic improvements on it--which is why I earlier stated that a sequel that is essentially the same movie as the first is not always a negative.

By virtue of this film's structure, we get a lot more time with the actual villainous kaiju whose predations the good kaiju is being blamed for, and Gaira is also a much better villain than Baragon because he is not cute. He's a horrible green troll with crooked teeth and canines that just out like tusks. There is zero risk of mistaking him for a puppy. Even his roar is kind of terrifying, though ti does oddly sound like he's shouting, "Shit!" at times, which can be inadvertently hilarious.

Additionally, Sanda is somehow a much more engaging character than Frankenstein was. The fact that he has a much better roar may have something to do with it, and his design is much more compelling. Both of the Gargantuas are great designs--I love how they seem to just be hairy humanoids at first glance, but they also have the suggestion of scales under their fur which just adds another layer of mystery to them.

Then there's the climactic showdown where the two monsters battle each other in Tokyo. It's an amazing monster fight with some top-notch miniature work. We see them smashing throuigh buildings until finally they plunge into Tokyo Bay and continue fighting in the water. The film even kind of improves in the inexplicable geological events department, as rather than declare a clear victor, the film decides to have them both perish when a combination of their fighting and the bombs dropped on them from the JSDF causes an undersea volcano to rise out of Tokyo Bay, ala the opening of Gorgo, and consume them both. It still makes no sense, but it's a hell of a lot more acceptable than the ground just giving up and collapsing under Frankenstein.

Where the film does not improve, unfortunately, is in its token gaijin. I'm not actually sure why the film cast Russ Tamblyn in the lead instead of Nick Adams, since this was before Adams's tragic death, but it's possible he was busy or they intended to switch things up. Unfortunately, while Russ Tamblyn is not a bad replacement, he lacks the easy rapport Adams had with his costars. Adams made you believe he understood them and was playing off their lines, while Tamblyn feels like he's just waiting for his costars to finish their lines so he can say his.

However, the rest of the cast--particularly Kumi Mizuno and Kenji Sahara--ably help to carry the picture. And of course Haruo Nakajima as Gaira and Yu Sekida as Sanda deserve a lot of credit for bringing great life to the Gargantuas.

I'm far from the first to sing this film's praises, but if you're a kaiju fan and you haven't seen it, you simply must rectify that at once.

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HubrisWeen 2016, Day 22: The Vampire Lovers (1970)

While Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula, set the stage for most of what we think of when it comes to modern vampire stories, it was not remotely the first influential vampire story. While there are probably even earlier examples, that honor goes to Carmilla--a novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu published as a serial from 1871-1872.

It's also easily the genesis of all lesbian vampire stories that we now know and love, as its titular vampire seduces and feeds upon young women. So it's only fitting that an adaptation of the film would be at the forefront of the lesbian vampire sub-genre's sudden boom in 1970.

Styria, a state of Austria, in 1794 has a bit of a vampire problem, specifically a family of vampires known as the Karnsteins. Baron von Hartog (Doulas Wilmer) narrates his tale for us, as we watch him waiting in the Karnstein castle in the hours before dawn. His sister was killed by one of the Karnsteins, and he has come to settle the score. he has taken a burial shroud from the grave of the vampire, knowing the creature cannot rest until it is returned.

[As a side note, I love how the vampires in this film don't really follow the traditional Hammer vampire rules, as we'll see]

Well, when the ghostly vampire returns to find its shroud gone, Hartog waves the shroud out the castle window like a flag, calling the vampire out. To his surprise, when the vampire comes inside, she is a beautiful blonde (Kirsten Lindholm) who mesmerizes him briefly so she can move to bite him--only for the cross around his neck to brand the bare flesh of her exposed cleavage. The spell having been broken, Hartog lops her head off with his sword.

Pretty sure this is basically how Donald Trump views all women.

Well, after our opening credits we're going to find that that opening is not going to relevant again for a while. We'll later learn he spent the rest of his time digging up and killing the remaining Karnsteins, but it seems he missed a few.

Many years later, General von Spielsdorf (Peter Cushing!) is holding a ball at his estate. During all the dancing, one guest arrives late, a countess (Dawn Addams), who introduces her lovely daughter, Marcilla (Ingrid Pitt!). Everyone is quite fond of the girl at once, especially the men, and that everyone includes Spielsdrof's daughter, Laura (Pippa Lee). When Laura points Marcilla out to her dance partner, Carl Gebhart (John Finch), however, he easily assures Laura that he only has eyes for her. Laura says that Marcilla keeps looking at Carl, but Carl astutely points out that actually, she's looking at Laura.

Suddenly, a mysterious man (John Forbes-Robertson) we'll see throughout the film rushes in, decked out in a fancy cloak that screams vampire to any viewer. He has a message for the countess, which is that a relative of hers is dying and she must leave at once to see to them. However, as she makes her apologies to Spielsdorf for her untimely departure, she must ask him for a huge favor: since it would be much too arduous a journey for Marcilla, could he be troubled to take her in until the countess returns?

Spielsdorf happily accepts and Laura is overjoyed. Naturally, we know there is something sinister afoot almost immediately, but it will be some time before anyone in the film realizes it. As far as Laura knows, she has a great new friend. A loving friend, who is very intimate with her.

The down side of all those Snapchat filters is that they tend to attract lesbian vampires.

However, one night Laura is troubled by a fitful sleep that brings a nightmare. She becomes convinced an enormous, gray cat is in her room. Now, most films that needed a huge cat but didn't have the budget for it might splice in stock footage of a panther or some other big predatory cat. They might have a person dress up in a cat costume that they very carefully kept out of sight. This film does not go either of those routes. Instead, we see close-ups on a still image of a cat's face superimposed over Laura and then what is plainly someone underneath a furry blanket crawls on top of Laura.

It's wise, then, that the film keeps the cat business to very short sequences because it utterly ruins any sense of horror by being utterly hilarious in its ineptness.

Laura also dreams that the cat became Marcilla, but naturally Marcilla helps the girl's family and servants to gaslight the girl into believing its all in her head. However, she is getting noticeably sick and weak. The doctor (Ferdy Mayne) diagnoses it as a harmless bit of anemia and suggests making sure the girl ingests lots of iron-rich foods to get her blood up. Spielsdorf fears it's something more sinister and he's right. The next morning, as Spielsdorf watches helplessly, Marcilla stands beside Laura's bed and tells him it's too late, for the girl has died with the first light of the sun. When the doctor comes in to check her, just too late, he discovers two small punctures on the girl's bare breast--and then Spielsdorf realizes Marcilla has vanished.

A short time later, we catch up with a recent English immigrant named Roger Morton (George Cole) and his daughter, Emma (Madeleine Smith), who had been close friends with Laura. However, both had left the ball before Marcilla arrived. So, Morton is riding with Emma near his estate and they come upon a carriage that has broken a wheel, they do not recognize its passengers: the mysterious countess and a very familiar girl she introduces as her niece, Carmilla. The countess is in a hurry to get to a dying relative, but fears her daughter has been much shaken up by the crash.

Emma pleads with her father to accept Carmilla as a guest, and naturally he relents at once. When Emma gleefully tells Carmilla she'll be staying with them, the slow predatory smile that crosses her face is delightful.

Carmilla has barely arrived before we already see her enjoying a bath when Emma walks into her room. After happily standing naked and walking to the vanity in front of Emma--who is not actually shocked by this--Emma asks if she can try on some of Carmilla's beautiful dresses. Carmilla assures her she can, but she has to take everything off first because it's the latest style in the city to be naked under your dress. Emma goes along with that, to Carmilla's delight, and even goes along witht he playful half-naked chase around the bedroom and gentle, romantic lounging in Carmilla's bed.

"Oh, it's absolutely all the rage in the city! All the young ladies practice scissoring now!"

Of course, while Carmilla is putting the moves on Emma already and Morton's departure for business elsewhere gives her ample freedom to do so, her new target has a few more people in her household that are close to her than Laura did. Aside from estate manager, Renton (Harvey Hall), she has a French governess named Madame Perrodot (Kate O'Mara), who is trying to teach the poor girl German. Carmilla is glad to help, of course, ingratiating herself to all around her--though Renton remains somewhat aloof to her charms.

At night, however, Carmilla is very busy. Not only is she prepping to give Emma the same treatment as Laura, but she satiates her hunger by hunting down peasant girls in the local village and draining them of all their blood. Then she begins the cat treatment on Emma, but this time there's a convenient scapegoat as the house has a large gray ca named Gustav, and Perrodot assures Emma that's what she's been seeing.

However, Emma knows Gustav can't be responsible for the bite on her breast--but Carmilla helpfuly appears to assure Perrodot that Emma was careless with a sharp broach that Carmilla gave her, and then shows it to Perrodot to demonstrate its two sharp points before sliding it onto her breast. Perrodot is suitably convinced, leaving Emma rather distraught that nobody is taking her seriously. Perrodot still has some doubts, so Carmilla decides her best bet is to seduce Perrodot, too.

I'm definitely with Carmilla on this one.

Well, after a tasteful seduction scene, Perrodot has become Carmilla's Renfield. Renton begins to suspect something is off when the governess won't let him send for the doctor as Emma begins to fall ill. When he complains about Perrodot's behavior in a local pub, he casually calls her vampire--and when everyone in the pub goes silent and turns to stare at him, Renton discovers that vampires are no joke in these parts. Upon hearing of the dead girls in the village, Renton begins to suspect he might have been right in calling Perrodot a vampire after all and begins scheming against her to protect Emma. Naturally, this means he is overlooking the true menace right under his nose...

Hammer knew that you simply don't cast Peter Cushing in your vampire film if he isn't going to stake something.

In the 1950s and well into the 1960s, Hammer was known for pushing the envelope. Their films were bloodier and sexier than almost anything else on the market and they stretched the boundaries of decency until they got away with more and more.

However, the problem with social boundaries is that they have a tendency to shift over time or all at once. By the late 1960s, movies could have full on nudity and more excessive gore than the previous decade dreamed of. So by the early 1970s, Hammer was already beginning to seem quaint because now they were trying to catch up to the envelope that they had been pushing.

The Vampire Lovers is a clear example of this, of course. While more extreme examples of the genre like Vampyres and Daughters of Darkness were still a ways away--and even efforts like Vampyros Lesbos and The Velvet Vampire aren't really any more lurid by comparison--this is a lesbian vampire movie that feels oddly chaste. Oh, there's plenty of nudity and even some kissing between Carmilla and her victims, and the desire Carmilla has for them is clear, but there's a clear reluctance to truly embrace its own conceit.

That doesn't mean I think the movie is a failure because it's not sleazy enough, mind you. It is a clear indicator of the trouble Hammer was soon going to have in keeping up with the new genre cinema of the 1970s, however.

Looking beyond that aspect of the film, however, there are definitely some unfortunate flaws of this film. For one thing, Baron Hartog does reappear in the film because his experience with the Karnsteins is crucial to defeating Carmilla. However, he has not been seen since the beginning and the filmmakers decide we need to have another character explain the opening of the film all over again, including showing us most of the sequence, in order to refresh our memories. For another, the mysterious male vampire we see throughout the film observing the various things Carmilla does with great delight is a completely unnecessary character who does nothing but leave us wondering why he's even there. Lastly, Madeleine Smith is a very lovely woman and a fine actress, but she has been made to play the wide-eyed ingenue to such an extreme degree that it becomes parody. She literally never seems to not have her eyes open as wide as they can possible go, and to appear as naive and doe-like as is humanly possible at all times.

I get that she needed to be innocent and helpless before Carmilla's charms, but come on. It especially hurts the film because you begin to wonder why Carmilla is after Emma when she has so much more chemistry with Perrodot.

However, the rest of the cast is not saddled with having to deliver such a ridiculous performance. Ingrid Pitt is asked to play a much younger character than she actually is, but I doubt anyone really notices because she is electrifying in the role. Kate O'Mara is great as Perrodot, effortlessly switching from playing the helpful governess, to the obstinate pawn of the vampire, and finally the desperately jealous servant begging to be kept in her mistress's good graces. She is also damn gorgeous, and I have a weakness for women who smirk the way she does so frequently.

And of course, Peter Cushing is awesome, as always.

This is definitely not the best of Hammer's output, but it is a very enjoyable film all the same. Even with its clear weaknesses, the amazing central performance by Ingrid Pitt is able to get it over the bumps--and the terrible vampire cat blanket.

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HubrisWeen 2016, Day 21: The Undertaker and His Pals (1966)

I'm not saying cannibalism is something that should be encouraged, but it is rather fascinating how distasteful most modern human societies find the concept. Certainly many of our mammalian relatives find it a much more normal activity to engage in, as anyone who has ever had a pet rodent who decided her litter of newborns needed to be made a bit smaller can attest.

It may have something to do with the fact that humans in general find the idea of being eaten somehow more horrifying than simply dying, combined with the fact that being eaten by another human is a pretty clear violation of any social contract you can think of. And, of course, there's the key point that in order for a cannibal to have a meal, they generally have to kill another person first and we definitely frown on murder in polite society.

Well, unless you're a police officer, though I hope we never find out if the same people who support murderous police officers would just as eagerly stand behind a cannibal police officer.

Of course, if there's anything worse than cannibalism, it might be finding out you've been fed long pig without your knowledge. To steal a joke from an old Onion headline, imagine how you'd react if you found out the hot dog you had just eaten had fulfilled someone's wish to be an Oscar Meyer wiener?

Now, a restaurant that feeds its patrons back to each other is certainly fuel for a horror movie, but as Sweeny Todd shows, it can also be fodder for dark comedy. Unfortunately for me, The Undertaker and His Pals is a full-on comedy, and we all know the worst kind of bad movie is a comedy. I braced myself going in, sure that I could handle its 63-minute running time. Surely the film couldn't actually make that feel twice as long, could it?

One of these days I'll learn my lesson, surely, but it ain't this one.

We open with three "toughs" on motorcycles doing donuts by a couple phone booths an an "Enter Not Do" road marking. Now, we're supposed to take these mooks to be what Donald trump would call "bad hombres," what with the black leather jackets and the Jolly Roger patches on their chests. However, I find it hard to take a sinister motorcycle gang seriously when they're wearing those round white motorcycle helmets.

When Speed Racer goes rogue.

At any rate, they seem to choose a name from a phone book and then ride their bikes over to an apartment complex. We see them make this ride in what feels like real time because the movie is 2 hours minutes in and already feels the need to pad itself out. Inside her apartment, Sally Lamb (Karen Ciral, one of the few actors the IMDb bothers to link to a character) is...filling an envelope on her couch, dressed only in a negligee. The camera leers up her legs at first, but this will shortly prove to be foreshadowing rather than just leering. However, the agonizing minutes we spend watching her prepare a letter for mailing will not amount to jack shit.

One of the bikers goes to her front door while the other two climb up her fire escape. Lamb mistakenly opens the door when he knocks and he tries to break her security chain, sending her fleeing back towards the other two who have just entered via the window. They pull knives on her as the third guy breaks in and she ends up being pushed onto their knives. I admit to a genuine laugh when the film cuts back to the framed photo of her sailor boyfriend on an end table as his expression changes to reflect horror at what he's watching them do to her.

What a coincidence, these are the faces I made during the movie, too!

Well, the bikers saw off Lamb's legs and make off with them. After the title card, we arrive at the funeral parlor belonging to the titular undertaker. One of the sight gags is so out of date I had to look it up, because the parlor has a sign over the door reading, "We give Trading Stamps!" Turns out this is basically the same as saying they have a frequent shopper rewards card. The parents of the dear deceased Sally Lamb are arriving for her funeral, and per the demands of visual comedy her father is skinny and her mother is fat.

Inside, Mort the Undertaker (Ray Dannis), cues up a reel-to-reel tape recorder that accidentally starts off with a rock song, "There's Never Been a Devil Like Me," which I can't identify the origin of, unfortunately, but it's pretty damn good. Mort realizes his mistake and hist a switch so the recorder somehow starts playing a funeral dirge instead, but...I don't think you can do that on a reel-to-reel.

At any rate, much levity is had at the fact that the Undertaker has taken great pride in the makeup job he did on Lamb but he has massively overdone her eye shadow. He also takes her father aside as her mother weeps and tells him they usually find it best to settle the bill at this point, since it helps to take a griever's mind off their loss. When the father reacts with rage at the hefty price, Mort gleefully replies, "See, you've forgotten your grief already!" It seems he quoted them $144.98 for the service, but they didn't read the comically lengthy contract they signed so he was able to jack the price up as much as he wanted.

When the mother comes over and demands to know how either man can talk of money at a time like this, Mort then says he could have just put their daughter in a small coffin instead of sewing plastic legs on her, which causes her father to faint. Mort promises that they will pay, no matter what.

Meanwhile, we wander over to the office of Harry Glass (James Westmoreland, credited as Rad Fulton) and within his debut scene I already want to see the bastard dead. In walks his secretary, Anne Poultry (Sally Frei), an attractive brunette in a tight red dress who is apparently Harry's secretary and bedwarmer, and he treats her with even less respect than that arrangement implies. He ignores her when she asks what he thinks of her hair and dress, until she finally has to make him look at her. When she asks why he won't marry her and pledges to jump out the window if he doesn't, he pretends to phone an unemployment agency to get a new secretary.

Eventually he talks her into joining him at his favorite local diner, the Greasy Spoon. It might be the only restaurant in town, for all I know, but there's not many folks in it at any given time. At any rate, the special of the day is "Leg of Lamb" and the movie makes damn sure you get the significance. The proprietor of the diner, Spike (No Clue), greets them and immediately takes a shine to Anne. However, she doesn't care for him calling her "baby" and tells him he can call her "Miss Poultry." Spike laughs at that and starts calling her "Chicken," which she just loves. However, Spike does eventually get to taking their order and when they both order the special, Anne finds it odd that he just yells "two orders" to the cook. Spike shrugs and tells her they don't currently have anything else but the special.

While Spike isn't listening, Anne and Spike discuss the diner's chef, who goes by Doc (Beats Me). Seems Doc failed out of medical school and then he became a short order cook in this dump, instead. Naturally, when Spike brings out their meals, Harry immediately notices that the meat is not lamb, despite Spike's smirking insistence that it is.

God, even when he's justifiably being a jerk I just want to punch him.

That's enough for Harry and he declares it's time for them both to go without eating or paying. However, Anne makes the mistake of insulting Spike and threatening to have the health inspector come in and shut them down.

That night, after Anne gets home and strips down to her negligee as well, she hears what is apparently supposed to be her cat but the person making "cat" sounds is no Frank Welker. When she goes outside in her negligee, we see the three bikers walking up toward her house and one kicks over a potted plant, which is given a significant close-up--I guess because we're supposed to notice that one of them dropped his Jolly Roger patch, but you won't be able to make that assumption until later. Anyway, Anne finds totally unrelated footage of a cat after wandering for ages next to a fence topped with spikes, and then turns to see the three bikers standing and looking at her--whereupon she just backs herself up against a wall and stares at them in fright.

Naturally, Anne ends up impaled on that fence. The next morning Harry arrives on the scene along with the chubby, bearded Police Inspector (Nope, No Idea). The inspector reveals that this is the fifth such murder recently, and there's seems to be no connection between them other than the fact that the murderers always take a portion of the victim's body. All they have to go on is the patch they found (told you), the general proportions of the three men based on their boot prints, and the fact they ride motorcycles. Harry just hopes the police can catch the bastards, and he isn't pleased when the Undertaker strolls up and informs him that Anne had no immediate family so it falls to her employer to handle her arrangements.

Harry is no fool, so when he sees the contract doesn't include the price, he writes down the exact price that Mort quoted him, $144.98. He also make sit clear that there will be no unnecessary upcharges or extras to try and cheat him of more money. The foiled Mort turns to leave and...this actually happens, folks...he steps on a skateboard and goes rolling down the driveway set to zany music. Finally he falls on his ass in the street and the film actually uses "sad trombone" unironically.

Naturally, the special at the Greasy Spoon that day when Harry comes in for coffee and donuts is "Breast of Chicken." Spike gets the coffee and offers his condolences on Harry's loss, but Doc announces from the back that the donuts haven't been delivered yet. He then turns back to studying a medical textbook while holding a scalpel. Just as he reads that a scalpel must always be kept sharp, he manages to slice his thumb on it. The delivery guy shows up after Doc has bandaged his thumb. Given that the delivery guy is black in a horror movie, we can safely assume that he's not going to be around long.

Sure enough, he begins asking why the diner never orders any meat from his store. Doc gives an obviously phony answer about using another vendor to spread the business around, as he goes back to studying. However, he soon notices that the delivery guy is poking around in everything in the kitchen and slowly grabs a meat cleaver and sneaks up on the guy. The delivery guy opens the walk-in freezer to see two human legs hanging from meat hooks, but is still rather surprised when he turns around and Doc buries the cleaver in his forehead.

In the front, another customer--a surly old man--comes in and orders the special. Spike glances into the kitchen, sees the dead delivery guy, and without missing a beat asks if the customer wants "white meat or dark." (Hyuk yuk yuk) The customer points out that chicken breasts don't have dark meat and changes his order to a whole pie. When Spike gives it to him, we see it's a cream pie, and sure enough the old man asks for a box to throw Spike off and then throws it in Spike's face. To top it off, this is followed by the second use of the sad trombone!

Meanwhile, Harry has gone to Anne's funeral. Mort reminds him that he refused any special touches and pulls back the curtain to reveal that the "casket" is really just a stained wooden crate marked "This Side Up" with a few candles lazily placed on top of it. Based on the dimensions of the crate, Anne was probably crammed into it. Unsurprisingly, Harry's response is to slug the Undertaker on the jaw and then smash a vase of flowers over his head before storming out. Mort mumbles about there being no gratitude any more.

Back at Harry's office, we get a sultry saxophone as a shapely blonde (Warrene Ott) walks in and lays herself out on his desk. She says her sister told her he had an opening that needed to be filled and--look, just fill in your own sleazy dialogue and it won't be much worse. The point is, she's here to bang him and type stuff. We get a painful bit of comedy when he asks her name and she says, "Call me Friday," and he misunderstands and asks her name again. There's also an inexplicable jump cut back to the establishing shot of the building in the middle of their conversation before we cut back again. I have zero idea why.

For some reason, when she mentions food Harry advises her to go to the Greasy Spoon for dinner. Spike greets her and asks what she wants and she says she wants a hamburger, but he advises they're plum out. She then makes the mistake of saying she has a pain from being so hungry. Doc immediately comes out of the kitchen excitedly and locks the front door and flips the sign to "Closed." Friday is still trying to figure out what's going on when she sees Spike pouring chloroform onto a rag and naturally by then it's too late.

With Spike's help, Doc gets her on a table stripped down to her underwear and covered with a blanket. He "scrubs in" and then cuts her stomach open with his scalpel and the film briefly cuts in actual surgery footage of some gloved hands poking around in somebody's internal organs. Unfortunately, Friday wakes up, screams, and then dies. Doc shakes his head over another lost patient, but cheerfully tells Spike that at least his operating method is improving.

Is this a food-related health code violation or medical malpratice? Both?

Later, we see Doc cheerfully feeding a woman's hand into an automatic meat grinder that is spitting out ground hamburger meat. (He didn't even take the bones out? Tsk, tsk) Meanwhile, Spike writes up the special of the day on the chalkboard but misjudges the space and thus has to write "hambur-ger." Mort storms into the kitchen as Doc is making patties out of Friday's remains and demands to know where the rest of her is. Doc points to the huge, steaming barrel labelled "Acid" at the back of the kitchen.

The Undertaker is furious that the two have double crossed him. Their deal was supposed to be 50/50--they get half of a victim for the meat and he gets the other half to bury. It's especially irksome because Mort has lost a lot of money thanks to Harry holding him to the quoted price. When Doc notices the bandages on Mort's bald head, Spike jokes that Mort shaved with...well, whatever he said is bleeped out by a cuckoo clock sound effect, so I guess it was a brand name joke and they didn't want to get sued.

At any rate, we see a woman relaxing in a sauna that has a Venus de Milo statue next to the hot rocks. Her two companions leave, but she decides to stay a bit longer, with her eyes closed. And then the film expects us to believe that the three bikers easily waltzed in by using white towels as a "disguise."

Bikers by day, Ninjas by night...

When the woman finally realizes it wasn't her friends who came back in, one of the bikers grabs a chain and smashes the Venus statue before beating the woman viciously about the face until she is slathered in fake blood. Her friends comeback to check on her and what follows is a masterpiece of awful staging.

First, her friends catch the bikers walking out of the sauna with a bloody sack before climbing out the window. However, the physical requirements of climbing out this window means that they walk swiftly to the window and then have to each stand and wait their turn as the biker in front of them awkwardly climbs out. One of the women opens a desk drawer and pulls out a snub-nosed revolver and shoots wildly out the window. However, the film couldn't afford blanks and, worse, they can't even bother to sync the gunshot sound effects to her wildly jerking around to indicate recoil. At any rate, she manages to shoot off one of the license plates.

Naturally, when the inspector calls Harry, he informs him that the license plate belongs to Mort. Harry isn't shocked in the slightest, but now we cut back to the bikers walking into the kitchen of the diner, which reveals that they were Mort, Doc, and Spike all along. Mort not only lost his license plate, but he caught a bullet to the neck. It's just a graze, however, but Mort understandably panics when Doc says he'll have to operate.

Spike reasonably points out that Mort is now a liability, since the police will easily trace him and with Doc's help he grabs Mort and begins pushing him toward the acid barrel. However, Mort suggests to Doc that Spike should be put in the acid, and for no reason I can fathom, Doc agrees. So Spike quickly finds himself hanging by a rope over the acid, begging his cohorts not to kill him. However, Doc assures him it won't hurt if they lower him in quickly enough--and then they proceed to lower him in slowly and feet first.

In his office, meanwhile, Harry calls "Charlie the Stoolie," so the film can for once cut right to the chase instead of running out the clock, because Charlie tells Harry exactly who Mort pals around with. So Harry gets the diner's kitchen and, on a hunch, pulls on the rope and lifts a skeleton out of the acid. A noise makes him lower it back in and then Harry suddenly runs into a very familiar blonde. However, this isn't Friday, it's her twin sister, Thursday (Warrene Ott, again). Given that Harry clearly didn't know Thursday or Friday before, I have no idea why Friday said her sister heard he had a job opening. Nor do I have any idea how she knew to look for Harry in the diner's kitchen!

At any rate, Thursday is instantly romantically inclined towards the "irresistible" Harry and they start making out. He tells her he doesn't know for sure what happened to her missing sister, but he has a bad feeling he does know. He calls the inspector to let him in on the apparent murder plot between Mort, Doc, and Spike-and then, because we're only 46 minutes in, the film decides to grind to an utter halt with driving footage.

Harry drives to his beach house with Thursday, while Doc and Mort follow on their motorcycles. The film thinks this is suspenseful, but I'd have to give a shit about any of the characters for that to work. Harry falls asleep on the couch while Thursday rambles on to him at 4 in the morning (?), and then we see Doc and Marty struggling to drive their bikes over the sand of the beach.

The next morning Harry and Thursday go out driving again while our villains follow behind them and I realize that time is an illusion. I have always been watching this movie. I was born, and I will die, in this driving sequence.

And then a metaphor for the entire film occurs because Harry runs out of gas. He flags a passing motorist down and, to my brief excitement, the oncoming car actually comes within inches of granting my request to "hit him!" (It comes so close, in fact, that I think the actor was actually almost roadkill) Harry, for some reason, just leaves with the guy to get gas, meaning Thursday is all alone in the convertible when Doc and Mort show up and begin chasing her around on their bikes. However, when a truck comes around a corner towards Doc, my prayers are actually answered and he is splatted.

Mort makes a hasty retreat. We briefly see him making a bomb out of a pint can, before turning to look into the camera and say, "All I need is a match!" I made this sound like it somehow follows the last thing we saw, but it does not. At all. Then we jump cut to Harry in his office, explaining to poor Thursday that her sister was killed by the trio for whatever their fiendish purposes required. Unfortunately, when he excuses himself, Mort sets off his paint bomb--and suddenly we realize this is supposed to be in the same building because Thursday hears and goes to investigate. She finds Mort and he chases her up the stairs--with the film alternating between silent music for her running and a slow organ for him staking up behind her.

Incidentally, we never see Harry again. It wasn't even until hours after the film ended that I realized Mort was supposed to have killed him in the explosion. The film granted my request to kill the prick but didn't let me enjoy it!

Thursday is eventually cornered on the roof, but when Mort lunges for her he misses by a good two feet and goes over the edge. Sadly, the bad dummy we see make the plunge is all too briefly glimpsed, but I still rewound it a couple of times to savor it. (Look, I'll take any joy I can squeeze from this piece of shit) Thursday calmly walks back down into the office and is joined by the police inspector. We then cut to the still alive Mort climbing back up onto a lower ledge, whereupon I may have yelled obscenities at the film.

As the police inspector talks about the nature of evil and the tragedy of the murders, he picks up a letter opener and walks over to a curtain in the corner of the office. Unbeknownst to Thursday or the inspector, Mort is lurking behind the curtain with a knife raised. However, Mort is about to get the Polonius treatment, for the inspector punctuates a final point about needing to stomp out evil by stabbing the curtain with the letter opener, thus putting it right through Mort's forehead.

Never opt for the discount lobotomy.

Well, the story is done now, but the movie isn't. However, it at least has the decency to end on a nice note. For that catchy damn tune, "There's Never Been a Devil Like Me," starts up and we see the various dead characters smiling and winking at the camera, usually in ways that reference their fates. It's legitimately fun and rather cute, even. So I do have something nice to say about this film.

Someone has already done a burlesque number based on this, I just know it.

The Undertaker and His Pals was shown at B-Fest the year before I was finally able to make it there. That's fitting, because throughout the film I could only think that it was a perfect fit for B-Fest, particularly as a 2AM mindfuck. Unfortunately, I watched it as just a movie.

There are definitely some entertaining moments scattered throughout the film, but if you were to trim the dead weight the film would probably be all of 30 minutes long. So it's hard for me to really know how to focus my thoughts on it. Sure, most of the time I was furious at it, but it also legitimately made me chuckle a few times, too.

All I can really say about the film is that, if you're curious, it's on YouTube in its entirety and it's only 63 minutes long so despite feeling like three times that, you'll only waste an hour of your life if you give it a shot.

However, you'd probably get more enjoyment by just skipping straight to the song at the end.

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HubrisWeen 2016, Day 20: There's Nothing Out There (1991)

In the grand scheme of things, Scream was nothing new. Horror comedies had been a sub-genre since before Abbott and Costello met Frankenstein, and horror movies that played off of audience knowledge and expectations of the genre were nothing new, either. Hell, one could argue that Jane Austen beat Kevin Williamson to the punch when you consider that horror films often owe a lot to gothic fiction, and Austen's Northanger Abbey was a blatant parody of the gothic genre right down to a heroine who is obsessed with The Mysteries of Udolpho.

So while I might, in my youth, have uncharitably decided that Scream somehow took its ideas from today's horror movie parody--simply because I enjoy it far more than Scream--that would be ignoring the fact that this film was far from original. And Kevin Williamson probably never even heard of it, but that's neither here nor there.

That being said, these days I can also understand the people who enjoy Scream more than this film. I actively avoided slasher films until I was just about done with high school, while even at 14 I would have absolutely been the target audience for this film. I mean, the core concept is a group of young people going out to a cabin in the woods for a fun weekend of nudity and laughs, while ignoring their token horror nerd's warnings that they are all doomed because they have accidentally wandered into a horror movie where there is a killer alien mudskipper waiting to pick them off.

I mean, already you may be thinking this is a bit more Cabin in the Woods than it is Scream, and you would not be far from the mark.

The film opens in a forgotten relic of the past, and rockets me back to a world that no longer exists. What do I speak of? Why, my friends, I speak of a video store where the VHS tapes in their rental clamshell cases are behind the counter and you have to bring your empty VHS box to the counter in order to rent your movie!

I know that I would never trade the world I live in now just to go back to this experience, but...I'd like to visit it occasionally.

Before I know it, my son is going to ask me what those things on the shelf are, and my bones will crumble to dust.

Okay, now that we've established that I am old, the young lady behind the counter is named Sally (Lisa Grant), but we won't learn that until much later. What's important now is that, while she stands absentmindedly behind the counter, someone comes into the store and tosses a VHS box onto the counter. She doesn't see them, but goes to get their tape--only for a black-gloved hand to lunge through the VHS tapes to grab her.

Sally falls down and crabwalks backwards as the black-clad menace advances on her, her terror emphasized by close-ups on various horror movie VHS covers. (My girlfriend could only roll her eyes at me every time I recognized a movie) More VHS tapes suddenly fall on her with bowling sound effects and she finds herself wrapped in the guts of several of them. Tangled in tape, she makes her way out the back door onto a raised porch and loses her balance. The tape catches in the door and it's implied she essentially hangs herself...

...only for Sally to wake up at the wheel of her car as she goes careening off the road into the woods. Yep, she was dreaming because she dozed off behind the wheel. As she takes stock of the fact she is awake and alive, she realizes her father is going to kill her for wrecking the car. As she tries to get the car started again, she doesn't see the strange glowing object floating down from the sky, nor does she see the green shape that falls past her window, but she does hear it splash into a puddle of water.

"Oh my gosh! A fallen cloud," she says, and I begin to wonder if anyone has ever said that. Perhaps the alien creature is annoyed by her stupidity as well, since it lunges at her then. We don't get a good look at it at this point but it clearly has two tentacles that terminate in a vague spade-shape, similar to a squid, and it uses them to bash in her windows. Then it throws itself at her windshield and she screams as it slithers inside to get her...

"Peanuts for Kiwanis?"

The opening credits then play over what the filmmakers probably thought was an awesome CGI tunnel effect, but obviously seems a bit kitschy now. We then join a high school classroom as an exasperated teacher realizes her class only cares about the fact that Spring Break starts in less than a minute. As we see Mike (Craig Peck) steal the sunglasses off of a sleeping fellow student, the teacher assigns them all an essay assignment on what they did for their Spring Break. That seems unlikely for a high school assignment, but okay.

Once out of the classroom, Mike proves to be the odd man out in a trio of couples preparing to head to a cabin for the break: Nick (John Carhart III) and Stacy (Bonnie Bowers), Jim (Mark Collver) and Doreen (Wendy Bednarz), and David (Jeff Dachis) and Janet (Claudia Flores). Naturally, they all fall into expected tropes. Nick is the one with the cabin, Jim is the big dumb jock, and David is the guy who's stereotypically nerdy enough to make Nick and Mike look less so. Stacy is the level-headed brunette, Doreen is the ditzy blonde, and Janet is a foreign exchange student. Janet is also the one David is sure will be a hold out because of her host family, but when the others invite her she says she can absolutely come along.

Meet your victims and T&A protagonists!

On the way, they pass by the police investigating the wreck of Sally's car, which is now turned on its side and Sally is nowhere to be found. Mike insists this is a warning and they should turn back now, because he has seen enough horror movies to know that they're doomed if they ignore it. The others, obviously, do not listen to him and so everyone disembarks at the cabin--especially after Jim threatens to fart if they don't all get out of the car.

Mike doesn't give up, however, but nobody wants to listen to him. However, we know that the rustling in the bushes that terrifies him belongs to a roving POV cam, which can only mean the thing that attacked Sally has found their cabin. Mike gets even more insistent when a van full of horny teenagers appears and goes skinny-dipping in the pond behind the cabin. (This is definitely a movie that cleaves to the philosophy that naked breasts are the cheapest special effect) When Mike calls Nick out to show him, Nick demands to know what the mostly naked people are doing in his pond. they apologize, as they were headed to the camp by the lake to be summer counselors and take their leave.

Mike points out that the group of people they just saw exist solely to be fodder for a slasher villain and that proves that they have somehow literally ended up inside a horror movie, but Nick isn't convinced and Mike's schtick is beginning to really annoy the others, especially Stacy. And I do have to give the movie credit here because, if you look past the fact that our cast are all moderately to very attractive adults pretending to be teens, you can actually see some clear hints as to why the hell these people are friends. Part of the dialogue between Nick and Stacy is him begging her to give getting to know Mike a chance, as he's a good guy. Clearly Nick is the geeky kid who became popular enough to hang with cool kids and keeps trying to bring his old friend along, even though he doesn't fit in.

I'm not really sure how David fits that narrative, though, but we need to fulfill our tropes, right?

Doreen takes a shower while Stacy prepares dinner for everyone. Doreen then ambushes Jim, who is wearing a vest ensemble that is painfully early 90s, so she can talk him into having sex in the shower. He objects at first until she drops her towel, then he's all about trying to bang in a small enclosed space. At dinner, the group discusses various topics but Mike brings it back to horror movies, insisting that there's either a masked killer or an alien out in the woods. Someone suggests a bear, which freaks Doreen out, but even Mike laughs that off since there are no bears in the area and if one was around surely it would have escaped from a circus on a unicycle.

However, it's not so funny when they hear a noise in the house. Going into the kitchen, they find the pan that had the rest of the chicken in it is on the floor--and it's not only empty but covered in green slime. The others make a joke about food poisoning, which Stacy just loves, while Doreen briefly wonders if it was a bear despite nothing about this suggesting such a thing. To Mike's horror, David and Janet decide to go for a walk in the woods with nothing but a pen flashlight.

Unfortunately for David and Janet, they're about to find out that Mike is not full of it. Janet tells David a ridiculous story about a couple so caught up in trying to have sex that they didn't notice a monster about to eat them, which of course is exactly what they're doing while laughing about it. We get our first good looks at the monster here and it looks rather like a mudskipper, as I said before, but with giant toothy mouth that has two long tentacles on either side of it, and then tiny insect-like legs behind that, with a fin on its back down its tadpole-like tail. Well, David promptly steps on one of those tentacles and the monster pounces on him, oddly it manages to pull Janet's skirt off (!) with one tentacle at the same time. Janet immediately leaves David to die, running headlong into the woods pantsless and all. David almost frees himself from the monster by tossing it away, but it catches up with him as he tries to flee and eats his spine out. Janet, for her part, runs headfirst into a tree in her panic and knocks herself out.

Tragically, David learned too late that the fish he'd bought came from Monsanto.

Jim and Doreen also decide to go out for a "walk," too. Mike tries to stop them, but eventually they go out anyway, though their actual intent is to go skinny-dipping. And then Nick and Stacy go upstairs to have sex (in front of a poster of The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey!), whereupon Mike realizes he is alone. Mike quickly rectifies this by barricading himself in his room and gathering up everything he can find to arm himself against possible attack.

Meanwhile, Jim and Doreen actually get naked (unlike the earlier skinny-dippers who only got topless) before jumping into the freezing pond. However, the roving POV cam is lurking around the water and makes itself known when the alien creature manages to pull the old Sideshow Bob and hit itself in the face with a rake. Hearing its angry growl terrifies the couple and they decide to head back in after Jim assures Doreen it's not a bear. They picked a good time, too, because the bubbles heading toward them indicate the alien had intended to attack them. The creature pulls itself out of the pond with its tentacles and we watch its POV cam head toward the house--snarling at the rake as it goes.

However, the glass breaking that Mike hears is Doreen and Jim because they had to force their way in with the front door locked. Mike dresses himself in a thick jacket, catcher's mask, and as many heavy protective items of clothing as he can find before heading downstairs with a baseball bat. Unfortunately, he has rotten timing--for Jim and Doreen are trying to have an intimate moment in front of the fireplace and when Doreen sees the alien looking at her with glowing green eyes she freaks out and accidentally kicks Jim in the crotch. Mike appears and gets a brief glimpse of the creature, but Jim sees Mike and assumes that Doreen was freaked out by Mike and assumes Mike deliberately dressed up to scare them.

Green eyed lady, lovely lady

The resulting scuffle between Mike and Jim brings Nick and Stacy downstairs. Meanwhile, Doreen has decided to wander off in search of her pants and when she gets to the basement door, a tentacle grabs her leg and pulls her down the stairs. Hearing her scream, the others rush to her side. Mike tries to take Doreen's explanation that something grabbed her as proof, but Stacy has had enough and screams at him that there is nothing in the house--before a cat drops into her arms. The cat has green eyes, so Stacy smugly asserts that the green-eyed thing that Doreen saw was the cat and she tripped over it and fell down the stairs. Mike, hilariously, goes on a rant to the heavens because he wants to know where the cat came from since it had to have been hanging from the ceiling waiting for the right moment to jump down.

Well, Jim gets the brutal idea to punch Mike in the gut and lock him in the basement for the night. Nick objects but he's the only one who does. Well, aside from Mike, but he's quickly too busy trying not to be eaten by the alien that was waiting in the basement.

The next morning, Jim and Stacy are delightfully happy to have had a night without Mike as they make breakfast. Doreen is still sleeping but Nick comes down to join them. However, Mike broke a pipe in his attempt to not be devoured, so the others soon discover the water's not working and then find the basement is flooded. There's no sign of Mike, either, beyond a broken window. Nick heads into town to get a plumber while Stacy invites Jim to go swimming. Jim's down, but needs to go upstairs to get his trunks and check on Doreen. Stacy goes ahead and strips into the bikini she'll spend the rest of the movie in.

"Look, every video game ever made assured me this is perfect monster fighting attire!"

Well, while Stacy is swimming in the pond, she discovers some green slime on a rock. Meanwhile, Jim discovers that the alien was hiding under Doreen's bed when it pins him to the wall with a tentacle to the face. Hearing Doreen scream, Stacy runs inside, just missing the monster shooting eye lasers into Doreen's eyes that knock her out. However, Stacy enters the room in time to see the alien drop Jim's limp body to the floor and turn on her. She avoids its eye lasers and flees, but the creature pulls the doorknob off with its mouth when she tries to lock it out her bedroom, so she desperately jumps out a window. (This is not a terribly convincing stunt since the cut after her hitting the window was too early and thus we can tell the stuntwoman jumped off the roof of the house)

She bumps into Mike, luckily, who was not eaten after all. As they try and assess whether any of their friends are still alive and what to do next, the monster tries to attack them but the tree they're hiding behind gets in the way, so Mike ties its tentacles in a knot. Back in the house, they recover Doreen, but when Mike goes to check Jim's pulse he discovers that Jim's skin peels off, and then the poor dumb jock bastard's face melts off. Meanwhile, the monster is attacking Stacy while a shocked Doreen watches helplessly. Of course, it seems oddly more interested in diving at Stacy's crotch than killing her.

Mike arrives in time to bat the creature away after Stacy kicks it into the air. They slip into Mike's room and when Stacy mentions it can chew the lock off, he sprays shaving cream through the keyhole and demonstrates that the creature does not like a mouthful of shaving cream. Talking about what they know about the creature, Mike realizes that the slime must be a digestive aid like human saliva and when it attacked the girls it didn't use the slime so it must want them for, uh, other purposes. This seems to be backed up when Janet staggers out of the woods.

Mike is reluctant but Stacy and Doreen rush to her aid. Only Doreen leads the half-conscious Janet to the couch instead of upstairs. When Stacy tries to stop her, Doreen whirls and reveals that her eyes are glowing green. Seems those eye lasers are actually a mind control device. Doreen attacks Stacy with clear intent to kill her, while the monster uses the distraction to advance on Janet...

The little known side-effect of Visine is that it replaces the red with green.

It's true that this is a very low-budget film, The witer/director, Rolfe Kanefsky, was only about 20 when the film was made and virtually none of the actors were professionals in any capacity. I have tried to show this film to people who could not get past that, and that's a damn shame because despite the amateur nature of this film's production it is a delightful little flick.

For one thing, while it has some clunkers here and there the script has a lot of great lines--most of which are given to Mike--and it knows exactly the kind of movie it's trying to be. The direction is also pretty damn good, with a lot of great angles used brilliantly. My personal favorite being an angle that quickly turns out to be from the creature's point of view as it eats its way through a victim's torso.

The creature is also a brilliant bit of work for a low-budget creation. Sure, it never looks very convincing but it strikes the perfect balance for the menace in a horror comedy: equal parts adorable and creepy. It also has a nicely well-established personality that makes it just clumsy and dumb enough to give the heroes a fighting chance against it, without making it totally impossible to take seriously as a threat.

While Gallant treats his date with respect, Gleegork is all pseudopods.

The film also knows how to use its low-budget to its advantage as a horror comedy. This is a movie where a character escapes from monster attack by swinging to safety on a boom mic when it drifts into frame.

It also manages to strike the ideal balance of sleaziness to satisfy exploitation fans without disgusting others. Of the main characters only Mike and David never get naked. Also, while its monster wants to mate with women, it doesn't ever succeed--or at least if it does, it's not on screen. And there's just enough gore without being excessive.

It's not a perfect movie, of course. Like I said, not all the jokes land and at times it is definitely trying too hard. That said, I love it to pieces and am glad that it has an established cult following. It may be necessary to look past its limitations as a microbudget monster flick, but if a viewer can manage that minor allowance they'll find it's a damn good time.

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