Saturday Sci-Fi Cinema Matinée—The “B-Movie Purgatory on Halloween” Edition
With Halloween almost upon us, we celebrate the worst of the worst in sci-fi/horror B-movies! It’s the close of the 1950s-early years of the 1960s, and we offer MonSFFen a cornucopia of silly storylines, awful acting, dreadful directing, poorly penned, melodramatic dialogue, shoddy special effects and generally bad production values!
Welcome to B-movie purgatory!
At noon on Saturday, October 20, we’ll ask the members present for our October 2018 club meeting to choose one of the following for review:
Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)
This is famously inferior filmmaker Ed Woods’ “classic” sci-fi picture about extraterrestrials seeking to prevent mankind from developing a doomsday weapon that could destroy the universe, no less! Their plan, designated “Plan 9,” is to deploy legions of Earth’s resurrected dead to frighten humanity into compliance, and if we do not acquiesce, to destroy us with these armies of undead ghouls!
Silent footage shot by Woods of ailing horror legend Bela Lugosi a few years earlier for another unrealized film was spliced into Plan 9, and Lugosi given posthumous billing. Inane, histrionic dialogue coupled with cheesy, low-rent production design and special effects, and just plain ludicrousness mark this feature as the worst film ever made, an assessment widely considered to be accurate. This is really bad stuff!
Nevertheless, Plan 9 has gained a certain cult following, regarded by many fans as a gem of the “so-bad-it’s-good” variety!
But it has some competition…
The Killer Shrews (1959)
An independent low-budget film that imagines the little, mole-like shrew as its monster, albeit in larger mutated form! The fiercely territorial shrew is a ravenous animal, often consuming twice its body weight in food daily! Some shrews are venomous.
Scientists on a remote island are experimenting with shrinking humans to half-size in order to reduce world hunger, reasoning that smaller people will consume less food. Their test animals are tiny shrews, but they end up accidentally spawning giant, voracious monster shrews, who promptly escape into the surrounding wilderness and begin killing and eating all the local wildlife, leaving the scientists under siege behind the walls of their compound!
First-time director Ray Kellogg, who headed 20th Century Fox’s special effects department for much of the 1950s, dressed dogs in shaggy shrew costumes for shots of the titular killer creatures chasing across the landscape, and utilized unconvincing puppets for close-ups. The cast, meanwhile, is an international one and some of their accented English sometimes makes it a challenge to understand the dialogue.
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A silly sci-fi tale says noted film reviewer Leonard Maltin!
The Creeping Terror (1964)
Star Vic Savage also produced and directed this one under the pseudonym A. J. Nelson. A decidedly amateur undertaking, numerous production problems and Savage’s chronic funding difficulties delayed and interrupted filming during the course of production. At one point, the special effects man who built the film’s monster, ticked at not being paid for his work as agreed upon, walked off the production with his creation just before shooting was to begin. Savage and crew had to hastily assemble a replacement monster that came across as a ridiculously slow-moving, oversized walking shag carpet that ambled about upending cars and devouring hapless victims with its gaping pie hole! Sound was apparently so poorly recorded and muddied that Savage ultimately had to hire a radio announcer to narrate the story throughout much of the film while only a fraction of dialogue overdubbing by a few of the cast members was completed in post-production. An alternate explanation offered is that the original soundtracks were lost, necessitating the use of a narrator.
Savage skipped town just before the film was to premiere as he faced irate investors, unpaid crew, and, likely, charges of fraud! He was never heard from again with regard to the movie business.
This one is topped only by Plan 9 From Outer Space on the list of worst movies ever made, according to most critics.
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962)
A sci-fi/horror effort about a mad doctor who has developed a means of keeping human body parts alive! When his beautiful girlfriend is severely injured in a car accident, he retrieves her severed head and sets her up in something like a roasting pan in his lab! Horrified with her predicament, she begs to be allowed to die, but he plans to commit murder in order to find another attractive woman upon whose body he can graft his sweetie’s head, Frankenstein-like!
Panned for its violence, sexploitation, and poor acting and direction, the film, according to critics, offered audiences of the day no redeeming social value, or any particularly likeable, or at the very least, interesting characters. “Funny in all the wrong ways,” stated one reviewer.
Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959)
Co-produced by B-movie legend Roger Corman, with his younger brother, Gene, who directed, this is the story of giant intelligent leeches living in a Florida swamp who feast on the local white trash, including actress and centerfold model Yvette Vickers, here playing a vixen cheatin’ on her husband! It is suggested that these leeches were, perhaps, the weird result of atomic radiation originating from nearby Cape Canaveral.
The leeches are played by actors wearing black sacks made of raincoat-like material with fake suckers stitched on to complete the costume. Shot over a period of just eight days, this film is also considered by many critics to be among the very worst movies ever made!
Oh, my! How to choose among such glorious examples of SF dreadfulness? Giant leeches and killer shrews???