Curt Siodmak wrote The Wolf Man and for that, we should always thank him. He also directed and wrote this film, which was shot in Eastmancolor on location on the Amazon River. There was 10,000 feet of color film left over that Siodmark couldn’t export. so the same cast and crew made Love Slaves of the Amazons.
Rock Dean (John Bromfield, whose wife Larri Thomas plays the nightclub dancer) wonders why the workers on his plantation have left. Dr. Andrea Romar (Beverly Garland) wants to find the drug that witch doctors use to shrink heads. That’s how they got on the Amazon. Their guide, Tupanico (Tom Payne) is really trying to lead his people back to the old ways and using the monster Curucu — or at least the legend — to drive them from the plantations.
At least there’s a scene where a piranha eats an arm. and wow, the ending, the gift of a shrunken head is always something.
Frank Tashlin made the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons and you know, that’s pretty much what this movie is. It’s a cartoon come beautiful and wonderfully to life. He’d work with Jerry Lewis on six of his solo films (Rock-A-Bye Baby, The Geisha Boy, Cinderfella, It’s Only Money, Who’s Minding the Store? and The Disorderly Orderly) and then work with Jayne Mansfield again on the movie Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?He also wrote the Don Knotts film The Shakiest Gun in the West.
I knew I would love this movie in the first few seconds, when Tom Ewell introduces the film by showing how CinemaScope and the colors by DeLuxe work. It’s an astounding moment that breaks the fourth wall before it has even been built.
A mobster who runs the slots, Marty “Fats” Murdock (Edmond O’Brien), has one dream. He wants his girl, Jerri Jordan (Mansfield), to be a singer. She has no talent, but he knows that press agent Tom Miller (Ewell, who is best known for The Seven Year Itch and whose last movie was Rodney Dangerfield’s Easy Money) can get the job done. Even better, he never hits on his clients.
Murdock is obsessed with a song he wrote, “Rock Around the Rock Pile,” and Miller has to go to enemy territory and sell the song to another mobster, Wheeler (John Emery, Kronos), who rules the jukeboxes.
There’s all manner of romantic confusion and a gang war over jukeboxes, which was actually a thing once. All ends well, with Jerri confessing that she really can sing and Murdock letting her know that he doesn’t want to marry her, so she can go off and be with Tom, the man she loves. The wedding dress that Mansfield wears here was loaned to her for her wedding to Mickey Hargitay.
Oh yeah — and Juanita Moore, from Imitation of Life, is in this. That’s what normal folks know her from. Me, I recognized her as Momma from Abby right away.
The real reason to watch this — beyond the rainbow of colors ready to bathe your eyes in perfect beauty and majesty — are the performances by Fats Domino, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, The Platters, Gene Vincent, Eddie Fontaine and more.
In The Beatles Anthology, Paul McCartney discusses how John Lennon learned how to play guitar from watching Cochran in this movie. It meant so much to them that they cut the recording of “Birthday” at Abbey Road Studios short to watch its 1968 British TV debut. Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck also claimed that this movie was a big influence.
Speaking of influence, some feel that Elvis was directly inspired by the dancing for “Rock Around the Rockpile,” which was somewhat of an imitation of him anyway, and may have used the look of this scene when he made Jailhouse Rock. The makers of The Girl Can’t Help It wanted Elvis for this film, but dealing with Colonel Tom Parker proved to be too much to deal with, as his asking price for one Elvis song was too expensive.
Want to love this movie even more? Listen to John Waters discuss it on the British DVD release. He would also tell the Directors Guild of America Quarterly, “This wasn’t a movie that my boy classmates wanted to see or cared about. They weren’t interested in discussing Jayne Mansfield’s complete lack of roots. I really had no one that I could be enthusiastic with about it. So it was a private secret of mine, this movie.”
Waters based so much of the character of Divine — she would even come on stage to the song “The Girl Can’t Help It” — from Mansfield. He also points out that Little Richard’s mustache in this movie had such an impact on him that he’s had it for his entire life.
This film is pure greatness on a level that very few movies ever hope to reach. You can watch it on YouTube.
Made by Daei, the same people who would gift us with Gamera, and released in the U.S. eleven years after it came out in Japan, this movie has been pointed to as one that Kubrick watched as he grew fascinated with science fiction.
The Pairan aliens of the film are perhaps the best reason to watch this. They’ve never looked better than now, with the gorgeous remastered transfer that’s on Arrow’s new disk. Designed by avant-garde artist Taro Okamoto, they’re unlike any aliens we’d imagine in the West. Instead of humanoid creatures, they’re stars that dance their strange ballet toward camera as they wonder how to reach Earth’s scientists.
One of those aliens decides to take the form of entertainer Hikari Aozora and reach out to our scientists and World Congress to borrow our nuclear weapons to obliterate another planet in the path of our world called Planet R. As no one decides to listen to her, we’re forced to deal with all the impact of having a rogue planet come closer and closer to us. The whole “listen to science’ mantra that our world is ignoring happens here as well, but sadly, we don’t have human-sized star aliens with one giant eye to right our course.
Clean-cut, square-jawed Rocky Jones of the Space Rangers was the lead character of a syndicated science fiction series that ran for two seasons from February to November of 1954. Shot in black and white, the show was about Rocky’s adventures as the space policeman for the United Worlds. Flying in his Orbit Jet XV-2 — and later the Silver Moon XV-3 — Rocky was a victim of budgets, as despite having a laser gun, he often defeated villains with his fists. Just as often, those villains were people in costumes speaking English instead of some alien tongue. Also, no matter where women came from — even lead villain Cleolanta, Suzerain of the planet Ophecius — they all love him in a precursor to the way James T. Kirk would be able to land any lady, even the green ones.
Rocky Jones was created by Roland D. Reed and starred Richard Crane as Rocky and former Our Gang member Scotty Beckett as Rocky’s co-pilot Winky. It was sponsored by Gordon Baking Company, which is why one of Rocky’s other ships was called the Silvercup Rocket after one of their bread brands. The show was greeted with a ton of cash-in merchandise, including watches, space dollars, badges, buttons, records, comic books and clothing.
Charactets changed in the last season, due to Professor Newton (Maurice Cass) dying of a heart attack — he was replaced by Professor Mayberry (Reginald Sheffield) — and Winky (Scotty Beckett) being arrested for possessing a weapon after being implicated in an armed robbery at the Cavalier Hotel in Hollywood. He left for Mexico, wrote some bad checks, got in a gun battle with the police and was jailed until he came back to the U.S. in 1954. He was replaced by a new comedy character, Biffen Cardoza (James Lydon). As for Cleodata, the new enemy became Juliandra, Suzerain of Herculon, played by Ann Robinson.
There are 39 episodes of the show with 36 being broken into 3-chapter arcs that were edited into TV movies. Menace from Deep Space are the “Bobby’s Comet” episodes that originally aired on April 6, 1954. The story is all about the Jovian moon Fornax, which is filled with energy crystals that Rocky and his friends — as well as his enemies — all want. Is it a Cold War analogy? Probably not. Yet the villains do dress like Arabic people and Cleodata refers to Rocky as an infidel, which is pretty strange.
There may be a kid sidekick, but Rocky’s love interest Vena Ray (Sally Mansfield) sure has a fancy car.
Ralston also sponsored a show called Space Patrol and working with Blue Bird shoes, gave away a spaceship. Here’s the ad copy courtesy of Solar Guard: “A hugh silver and scarlet rolling clubhouse, the Commander’s rocketship, the Terra IV. The ship is 35′ long, 10,000 lb in weight with a full size motorized flatbed truck to pull the Rocket. You can take the rolling clubhouse on trips, camp outs with your dad, sightseeing trips, or use it for you and your friends Space Patrol Headquarters. It has bunk beds lights, cooking equipment, and lockers for space gear. In addition to the Ralston Rocket there is $1,500 in cash to spend.”
There was also supposedly a rocket that traveled to promote Rocky Jones and for years, I’d hear rumors that people had found it. Imagine having your own space ship.
For a fictionalized retelling of the days of space kids TV, check out the Matt Fraction and Howard Chaykin comic book Satellite Sam.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The She-Creature was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 6, 1965 at 11:15 p.m. It also aired on August 13, 1966.
Edward L. Cahn also made Creature With the Atom Brain, Invasion of the Saucer Men, Zombies of Mora Tau and so many more. In this, Dr. Carlo Lombardi (Chester Morris) hypnotizes Andrea Talbott (Marla English) back through her past lives all the way back to her prehistoric form. He then uses her — the makeup by Paul Blaisdell is awesome — to kill his enemies.
Actor Edward Arnold died two days before production began and Peter Lorre, who was to play Lombardi, read the script. He fired his agent for not consulting him and pulled out of the movie.
The She-Creature suit nearly killed its creator — it got waterlogged in the beach scene and he was almost pulled into the undertow. The suit was used to promote the movie on Los Angeles talk shows, but Blaisdell was too exhausted to wear it, so Bob Burns appeared. The She-Creature also shows up in Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, Voodoo Woman and How To Make a Monster.
In 1967, AIP got Larry Buchanan to remake the film in color for television as Creature of Destruction.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Black Sleep was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 14, 1963. It was also on the show on July 5, 1964 and January 23, 1965.
Reginald Le Borg was a banker in Austria and a director in America, making low budget horror at Universal like The Mummy’s Ghost and Weird Woman. Released along with The Creeping Unknown, it was ahead of the Shock Theater package that would ignite a new interest in Universal’s horror movies. It’s also Bela Lugosi’s last movie, although footage of him appears in Plan 9 from Outer Space.
Dr. Gordon Ramsay (Herbert Rudley) claims that he is innocent yet remains in jail, guilty of murder, when surgeon Sir Joel Cadman (Basil Rathbone) offers him a chance at redemption. All he has to do is assist him with some experiments, starting with taking a potion called The Black Sleep, which will put him into a deathlike slumber.
After the “dead” body of Ramsay is discovered in his cell, Cadman takes the body for burial and revives Ramsay back in his lab. There, he’s attempting to learn the mysteries of the brain so that he can bring his wife Angelina (Louanna Gardner) back to life. One of his servants, Mungo (Lon Chaney Jr.) was once Doctor Monroe, one of Ramsay’s former teachers. Now he’s a monstrous beast barely under control. And then there’s the mute — and frightening — Casimir (Bela Lugosi).
So why do Laurie (Patricia Blake), Odo (Akim Tamiroff, who replaced Peter Lorre, who wanted more than this production could pay for) and Daphnae (Phyllis Stanley) work for him? It turns out that Laurie is Mungo’s daughter and wants her father to be normal again. That said, there’s an entire basement filled with experiments that haven’t worked, broken human beings — like Tor Johnson — led by a maniacal preacher named Borg (John Carradine). They’re so close to breaking through the doors to the lab…
The Black Sleep has a great cast but doesn’t do much with them. But it’s a fast movie and if you don’t think too much — or want to hear Bela speak — you may enjoy it.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Atomic Man was first on Chiller Theater on Sunday, October 13, 1963. It was aired on March 7, 1964; July 10, 1965 and December 3, 1966.
Cut down by seventeen minutes and renamed from Timeslip, The Atomic Man played U.S. theaters on a double feature with Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It had already been a live TV play in England and would also be the first of three novels with The Isotope Man coming out in 1957.
Directed by Ken Hughes (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Sextette, Night School) and written by Charles Eric Maine, this movie has an interesting idea in it: a man is found shot in the back and nearly drowned. When he revives, he is a few seconds in the future from the rest of reality and able to answer questions before they are asked.
Faith Domergue is in this. She was discovered by Howard Hughes, who she dated from the age of 16 until she learned that he was also dating Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner. She became an early scream queen, appearing in Cult of the Cobra, This Island Earth, It Came from Beneath the Sea and Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet. She began traveling to Italy in 1952 and staying in Rome for extended periods. She married director Paolo Cossa and was in several Italian movies including One on Top of the Other and The Man With the Icy Eyes. Her last movie was The House of Seven Corpses.
Directed by Fred M. Wilcox from a script by Cyril Hume that was based on an original film story by Allen Adler and Irving Block, Forbidden Planet is a movie that is forever in the zeitgeist of what 1950s American science fiction looked like. It’s also the first movie to show hyperspeed travel, to have a robot with a personality — Robby the Robot — as well as the first to use an electronic soundtrack. It’s also kind of, sort of The Tempest, which is a big idea to get your head around.
After a year in space, United Planets starship C-57D wants to land on the distant planet Altair IV and see what happened to an expedition that landed there twenty years ago. One of the survivors, Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) tells them that it’s too dangerous for them but Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Neilsen) lands anyway.
Joined by Jerry Farman (Jack Kelly) and “Doc” Ostrow (Warren Stevens), Adams discovers that everyone but Morbius is dead. His wife may have died of natural causes but he claims an unseen force killed everyone else one-be-one. Other than his servant Robby, the only other living thing is his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis).
Proving that men will always be men even in the future, Adams finds Farman kissing Altaira and yells at both of them — him for his behavior and her for how she dresses. She looks too attractive! His men have been on a ship all alone for a year! And you know, when he sees her swimming, he kisses her too! And then a tiger attacks him and she has to shoot it with a blaster.
Morbius has been using materials that he found from the previous occupants of this planet, the Krell, making his brain twenty times smarter. There are also 9,200 nuclear reactions below the planet making it filled with energy, power that Adams wants to bring to Earth. Morbius gets angry and says that they don’t deserve it.
At the same time, that alien force kills Engineer Quinn (Richard Anderson, years before The Six Million Dollar Man) and Farman. It turns out that the same technology that increases Morbius’ brain power has also unlocked his id, unleashing a monster that kills at his subconscious command. This becomes even more obvious when Altaira tells Morbius she is leaving with Adams. Robby detects the creature approaching and his master commands Robby to kill it, but the robot knows it is Morbius and shuts down. After accepting the truth, the creature disappears and Morbius dies, just in time for his daughter to leave the planet which blows up real good.
To make up for the huge cost of this movie, its props were used again and again. The spaceship appears in the Twilight Zone episodes “To Serve Man” and “On Thursday We Leave for Home;” Robby is in The Invisible Boy and plenty of TV shows before he became a star on Lost In Space, including “One for the Angels,” “Uncle Simon” and “The Brain Center at Whipple’s” on The Twilight Zone, his head dome appearing on “The Bridge of Lions Affair” episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and even all the way to the 70s, Robby was Chuck on Mork & Mindy, as well as appearances on the shows Project UFO and Space Academy as well as the movie Phantom Empire.
This movie is so well-known that it’s the film within the Mystery Science Theater movie.
Connie Hayward (Virginia Maynor) and Trevor Hudson (Lloyd Nelson) have gone to the Himalayas and hired a guide named Steve (Tom Maruzzi) and brought along Dr. Erickson (George Wells Lewis) to locate Connie’s missing brother. When they find her brother’s camp, they find it abandoned except for a native guide named Varga (George Skaff).
That’s when the yeti attacks and it turns out that Varga is a fifth-generation relative of the creatures, who have been mating with human women to wipe out the wildness in their DNA and become human themselves. He tries to assault Connie, but Steve — in love — saves her. Varga falls to his death and now the two have the wildest meet cute story of all time.
This was directed by Jerry Warren — oh man, Jerry Warren — and written by B. Arthur Cassidy. It’s actually Warren’s first film, one he made because the Yeti had been in the news a lot in 1956. He got the suit from White Pongo to be the Man Beast, took some footage from a Mexican movie and shot the rest at Keywest Studio and Bronson Canyon.
For some of the shots, that’s Warren’s future wife — like days later, because they left the set to go straight o Vegas — Brianne Murphy in the costume. She handled props, makeup, hair, wardrobe, script and stills for this movie and later in her life she was the first female director of photography for a major studio film — 1980’s Fatso –– and the first woman to be a member of the American Society of Cinematographers Guild.
She also was the first female executive board member of her local union branch, but only after one union officer told her: “My wife doesn’t drive a car, and you’re not going to operate a camera. You’ll get in over my dead body.” She waited until that guy died and came back to be accepted.
As for Jerry, eventually he realized that making movies took a long time and that he could just remix foreign movies. The first he tried this out on was Space Invasion of Lapland, which he remixed and released under the title Invasion of the Animal People. Others that went through the Warren process included Bullet for Billy the Kid, The Violent and the Damned, No Time to Kill, Attack of the Mayan Mummy (AKA La Momia Azteca), Face of the Screaming Werewolf (La Casa del Terror), Creature of the Walking Dead (La Marca del Muerto) and Curse of the Stone Hand, which features footage from the Chilean movies La casa está vacía and La dama de la muerte. He also said screw copyrights and made The Wild World of Batwoman and his last movie, Frankenstein Island.
VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the May 9, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.
The greatest birthday of my life was when I turned seven in 1979. Sure, I had a roller skating party, but getting a Rodan Shogun Warriors figure that had a wingspan longer than my height was literally my greatest dream come true.
Ken Kuronuma, who wrote the original story for this film, based it on Captain Thomas F. Mantell, a pilot for the Kentucky Air National Guard, who died in a crash while allegedly pursuing a UFO.
This was the most popular of Toho’s movies in the United States for some time. It had a major ad campaign and boasted actors like Keye Luke, George Takei and Paul Frees. Maybe American audiences liked giant birds better than lizards. Or maybe it was because it was shot in color.
Giant bugs known as meganuron have been killing miners in a small town while unidentified flying objects continually attack. It turns out that there are two pteranodons that have been awakened by nuclear bomb tests. The flaps of their wings unleash sonic waves that take out entire cities, but they can’t survive being burned in a volcano.
Once I see this movie as an adult, the end, where they try to escape that fiery doom, makes me tear up. I hate that humanity causes these creatures to be reborn and then spends the entire movie trying to destroy them.
Rodan would, of course, be back. As for seven-year-old me, Rodan destroyed many a city and fought many a robot. I was the kind of kid that would delight in telling you that Rodan’s original Japanese name Radon is derived from Puteranodon, the Japanese word for Pteranodon. There was a soap with that name in the U.S., so the name was changed.
Director Ishiro Honda should be recognized in the same class as so many great filmmakers, but he may never be, as he mainly worked in genre cinema. He worked on nearly every Godzilla movie, as well as The Mysterians, Matango, Frankenstein vs. Baragon, The War of the Gargantuas, King Kong Escapes and shot second unit on Ran.
Child me was not incorrect. Rodan is the kind of movie that you can watch again and again.
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