Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965)

AKA: Frankenstein vs. Baragon;  フランケンシュタイン対地底怪獣バラゴン (literal translation: Frankenstein vs. Subterranean Monster Baragon)

Directed by Ishiro Honda

Featuring Nick Adams, Kumi Mizuno, Tadao Takashima, Yoshio Tsuchiya, and Koji Furuhata

Nazi soldiers burst into the lab of Dr Frankenstein and steal the still-beating heart of his monster. They ship the heart to Japan via submarine, where it is destroyed in the bombing of Hiroshima… or so it seems.

Fifteen years later, a feral boy is found living in a cave, with a square head and prominent brow that give him an appearance that it suspiciously similar to the classic Frankenstein’s monster. It seems that the heart has somehow regenerated into a full person, and scientists take him to a lab to study him.

The boy starts to grow at an alarming rate (and his raggedy clothes somehow grow along with him!). He escapes from the lab, and the ensuing havoc wreaked around the countryside is attributed to him. So both the scientists and the military start searching for him. But he isn’t responsible for all the destruction: the dinosaur-like kaiju Baragon (who has a single glowing horn in the middle of his forehead) had emerged from beneath the ground during an earthquake, and has been causing plenty of trouble. Of course, the two monsters must eventually face off in a climactic battle…

This is a very strange kaiju movie, with little actual kaiju action until the final half hour. The first two thirds of the film plays out more like a regular science fiction film, if a pretty odd one given the subject matter. It somehow manages to be a little dull at times, in spite of having plenty of action going on, but the overall weirdness of the whole thing kept me going until the end. I initially felt a little let down by the final battle between the two monsters, because at first it seemed like it was just going to be a chaotic minor tussle. But the final fight, against a backdrop of a burning forest, provided a very memorable series of closing images, a worthy finale.

Worth watching? For fans of kaiju movies, definitely: it’s an energetic and very offbeat kaiju film.

Truth in advertising? This film was an American-Japanese coproduction. The Japanese title works well enough, if you can forgive the whole ‘Frankenstein’ vs ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ issue. But the English title… well, Frankenstein doesn’t conquer anything in this movie, and Frankenstein’s monster can hardly be said to have conquered the world either: 1/5.

Goliath and the Vampires (1961)

AKA: Maciste Contro il Vampiro, Maciste vs. the Vampire

Directed by Giacomo Gentilomo

Featuring Gordon Scott, Leonora Ruffo, Jacques Sernas, Gianna Maria Canale, Rocco Vitolazzi and Guido Celano

Goliath comes home from a day ploughing the fields/jumping off a cliff to save his girlfriend’s young brother from drowning (just another day in the life of a typical miniskirted Maciste muscleman!) to find his village destroyed and many of the inhabitants kidnapped. The raiders throw the older women overboard, feeding them to the sharks. But the younger ones, including Goliath’s girlfriend Guja, are trafficked away to the Sultan’s harem. On their way, some of the captives are drained of blood to feed Kobrak, the vampire-like leader of the raiders.

Goliath sets forth and rescues Guja from the harem, after destroying parts of several buildings and fighting a lot of people along the way. The two of them travel away through a dust storm, stumbling into the lair of Kurtik, who leads an army of blue-skinned men. With their help, Goliath fights the supernatural Kobrak and his army of automaton-like soldiers and tries to outwit the conniving Astra to save his fellow villagers, who have been transformed into waxy, statue-like figures.

This is a really unusual peplum, with some quite wild horror and fantastical elements. It is a bit slow and talky in parts, and suffers from some quite uneven pacing, but aside from that it is pretty cool once the action gets into gear. There are plenty of feats of strength from Goliath, the requisite dancing girls (including one dancing to some oddly rock and roll style music in an ancient tavern!), as well as some entertainingly cartoonish moments, such as Goliath fending off dozens of sword-wielding attackers with an effortless swing of a chain. There are also some interesting ideas, like when Goliath is trapped inside a giant bell to try to drive him mad via the noise it makes.

It also mostly doesn’t look too bad, with some atmospheric scenes during the dust storm and a fight in a swamp, and has quite passable palace and marketplace sets. Sure, some laughable monsters occasionally make an appearance, but I don’t think that hurts in terms of entertainment value. All in all, it’s a slightly strange but mostly pretty enjoyable sword and sandal movie.

Worth watching? If you like sword and sandal movies, this one is definitely worth checking out.

Truth in advertising? Kobrak isn’t a typical vampire, but he does drink blood so I guess the title comes close enough: 4/5.

Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962)

Directed by Albert Zugsmith

Featuring Vincent Price, Linda Ho, Richard Loo, June Kim, Philip Ahn, and Yvonne Moray

Vincent Prince plays a sailor and descendent of Thomas de Quincey, who stops off in 19th century San Francisco. While there, he gets mixed up in Tong wars in Chinatown, fighting various bad guys and running around in sewers as he tried to help women who are being trafficked and sold for opium.

This movie really has virtually nothing to do with de Quincey’s book, although Price does provide some pompous ‘philosophical’ narration that I suppose is inspired by it. It’s quite a strange film, with a confusing plot full of odd and nonsensical choices: at one point, Price uses a large decorative kite to fly up and break into the upstairs window of a building, he gets knocked out multiple times via being lightly tapped on the head, buildings are full of ‘hidden’ secret rooms that are very easy to find, Price is upstaged by a little person ex-courtesan who acts as his guide (and seems extra surreal given that she is in yellowface makeup…), and the action slows to a crawl during the climax of the film to make way for overlong scenes of women performing dance numbers before they are auctioned off.

This is a strange role for Price. He is ill-fitted to the role, which involves a lot of fighting in addition to all the other weirdness, and he seems kind of ill at ease throughout. He also plays a pretty inept hero, who goes through a cycle of getting captured and escaping multiple times, and is not very successful in his attempts at rescuing the trafficked women. This film also includes a lot of Asian actors, which is unusual for its time period – but I can’t say much positive about this since their roles are all quite racist given how stereotyped they are.

Despite all the odd goings-on, the movie is often quite lacking in excitement. I kind of enjoyed its strange and sometimes claustrophobic atmosphere though – it plays out a bit like a weird, convoluted dream. This is most true of the section where Price makes his way into an opium den and smokes a pipe. Although the actual hallucination sequence is pretty humdrum, it is followed by an unusual and kind of cool sequence where Price wakes up and escapes the opium den, going through a window and hanging off the roof. But he is still under the influence, so this chase scene plays out in slow motion and in total silence, with weird theremin sound effects when the sound kicks back in. In my opinion, this was the best and most interesting part of a pretty uneven film.

In summary, this movie is kind of a mess overall, and often feels dull in spite of there being a fair amount of action. Still, I liked it for its atmosphere and select interesting moments.

Worth watching? It doesn’t really work well as a whole, but is a curious side note to Vincent Price’s career.

Truth in advertising? It is an extreme stretch to call Price’s character an ‘opium eater’, and this movie has almost nothing to do with de Quincey’s book. Really the title is an exercise in pure exploitation: 1/5.

The Twonky (1953)

Directed by Arch Oboler

Featuring Hans Conried, Billy Lyn, Janet Warren, Ed Max, Gloria Blondell, and Evelyn Beresford

When a university professor’s wife goes away for a few days, she gets a television to keep him company. Unexpectedly, the television turns out to be sentient, tottering around on unsteady legs. It also has strange powers, emitting a ray that allows it to do things like light the professor’s cigarettes, change the records on his record player, change his clothes in an instant, and create money out of thin air.

Althought the television initially appears to be helping and protecting him, it starts to take over his whole life. It knocks out and brainwashes those that try to stop it, or in one notable case, steals all her clothing. The professor’s football coach friend calls it the Twonky, saying this is a word for something you don’t understand. The coach also theorises that the Twonky is a shapeshifting creature from another world.

This rather unusual comedy starts off as a rather broad satire on television and its control on viewers, at a time when it was a new technology. Later, some science fiction ideas pop up in the form of the coach’s ideas on where the Twonky came from. Unfortunately, neither of these ideas are developed to their full potential, with the movie devolving into slapstick as it goes along.

Despite this, I still quite enjoyed it. Hans Conried really carries the film, putting in an energetic and committed performance as the flabbergasted professor. It’s quite amusing to watch him get more and more flustered as he struggles and loses against the Twonky time after time, as the Townky escalates the havoc it is causing in his life.

Worth watching? This is quite a strange film, probably of most interest to those who enjoy cinematic oddities.

Truth in advertising? 5/5.

First Man Into Space (1959)

Directed by Robert Day

Featuring Marshall Thompson, Marla Landi, Bill Edwards, Robert Ayres, Bill Nagy, and Carl Jaffe

A reckless young test pilot disboeys the orders of his military commander brother, and flies his plane so high that he leaves the Earth’s atmosphere. Unable to turn the rocket around, he disengages the front part of the ship and comes crashing back to earth.

The front part of the ship is found empty, and totally covered with an extremely tough coating of meteor dust. The pilot is nowhere to be found. But humans and livestock start to be found with slashed throats, drained of blood. It turns out that the pilot is responsible for these killings, having been transformed into a clumsy monster, with seemingly impenetrable armour-like skin and a thirst for blood.

It’s true that this film is very dependent on stock footage, has a predictable plot, and is a little slow in its first half. But it also has some pretty good space special effects for its time, and gets a lot more energetic once the monster is on the scene. Although the monster looks pretty hokey at times, there are some quite effective sequences towards the end of the film: chase scenes through the shadowy corridors of a military medical institute, and some suspenseful and emotionally effecting moments with the monster once his brother and colleagues capture him in a compression chamber.

All in all it is a mix of elements that work and those that don’t, but I found it to be a pretty enjoyable watch, an expression of anxieties about progress and the unknown.

Worth watching? I think so,if your expectations are not too high.

Truth in advertising? 5/5.

The Revenge of Dr X (1970)

AKA: Venus Flytrap, Body of the Prey, Akuma no Niwa, The Devil’s Garden, The Double Garden

Directed by Norman Earl Thomson

Featuring James Craig, James Yagi, and Atsuko Rome

An angry, overworked NASA scientist has a health attack while on the job, and is sent off on holiday to Japan to recover. Instead of resting, he returns to his old love of botany, launching straight into conducting experiments on a venus flytrap. With the help of his cute Japanese assistant and some pearl divers, he gets his hands on an underwater plant which he uses to create a weird humanoid hybrid with the flytrap. The creature eventually gains the ability to move around of its own accord, breaks out of the lab and goes on a violent rampage as villagers chase it with flaming torches. It is up to the scientist to work out how to stop the monster before it does any further damage.

This is a very odd film, just strange through and through. It starts off bizarrely, with a cobbled on title that has nothing to do with the rest of the film, and incorrect credits that appear to have been randomly taken from Eddie Romero’s Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968). It is also based on a screenplay written decades earlier by Ed Wood, which perhaps explains some of the off-kilter elements of the storyline.

It’s not a good movie, and is a bit over long. But its deep strangeness comes with a kind of dream logic and atmosphere that I found kind of compelling. There are plenty of odd musical choices and wonky dialogue. The monster is seriously bizarre: once it develops into a humanoid creature, it has big spikes on its body (including where its nipples would be!), crazy vine-like ‘hair’, and giant venus flytraps for hands. I think I could have handled the creature design if the flytrap was the mouth or face, but in what universe would the flytraps be hands?? In the universe of this weird-arse film, that’s where.

It also features a lot of mad scientist plant-experiment activity, a peculiar interlude in the American countryside where the scientist is exhorted by a yokel to check out a shed full of snakes while waiting for his car to be fixed, early claims that a nearby volcano isn’t dangerous (a Chekov’s gun if ever I saw one), and the sudden gratuitous inclusion of a bunch of bare-breasted female divers.

All in all it’s an outlandish film that doesn’t really make a heap of sense, but one that would make for good late night delirious bad movie viewing.

Worth watching? Yes, for bad movie lovers.

Truth in advertising? None of the various title variations aside from Venus Flytrap seem to bear much relation to the content of the film. In particular, The Revenge of Dr X is blatant false advertising: yes, the film involves a doctor, but he is never referred to as ‘Dr X’, and doesn’t take revenge on anyone: 1/5.

Ebony & Ivory (2024)

Directed by Jim Hosking

Featuring Sky Elobar and Gil Gex

A bizarro version of Stevie Wonder rows a small boat to the Mull of Kintyre, where he goes to stay with a bizarro version of Paul McCartney in his Scottish cottage. The two of them insult each other, have weird conversations, get high, eat endless vegetarian ready meals and frolic naked on the beach, generally just messing around in an absurd fashion for the whole runtime of the movie.

Although I enjoyed the intense weirdness and eccentric characters of director Jim Hosking’s previous films The Greasy Strangler (2016) and An Evening with Beverly Luff Lynn (2018), I found this film to be pretty difficult to get through. There are many drawn out scenes full of endless repetition, which I found pretty painful to watch (for example, the two main characters dressed as sheep, baa-ing back and forth at each other for what felt like an eternity). There isn’t really any plot, just one random scene of silliness after another. There were some amusing moments, but I found these to be few and far between.

This film is certainly a surreal viewing experience, but it felt quite empty to me. I’m not sure what it was trying to say, if anything at all, and ultimately did not find it very interesting.

Worth watching? This film is a real oddity, but not one that I would really recommend watching.

Truth in advertising? I guess the title has a tenuous link to the content of the film: 3/5.

Nightbeast (1982)

Directed by Don Dohler

Featuring Tom Griffith, Jamie Zemarel, Karin Kardian, George Stover, Don Leifert and Anne Frith

An alien’s spaceship crashes in the woods near a small town, in a series of explosions that appear to use up a large proportion of this film’s budget. The alien survives, and immediately begins indiscriminately killing anyone it comes across: sometimes in bloody fashion, injuring them using its own strength, but more often vaporising them with its ray gun. The local sheriff tries to deal with the situation and evacuate the town, but has to contend with a seemingly indestructible alien, a mayor who ignores the threat in order to hold pool parties and schmooze with the governor, and with the interpersonal dramas of his team.

Although not a good film by any means, this is a fairly servicable piece of regional horror. The alien is both grotesque and amusing: it has a static but horrible face, with wrinkled skin, beady eyes, and a gaping mouth full of way too many crooked teeth, some of which are disturbingly long and curved. On the other hand, it looks very silly, wearing a silver suit with a plunging v-neck – something that would not look out of place on a disco dancefloor.

Although there is some fairly bad acting and an occasionally clunky script, it has special effects that are pretty impressive given the obviously low budget. Sure, the effects are somewhat rudimentary, but they are still fairly effective, particularly the ‘vaporisation’ effects that overlay animated stars onto a person’s body before they are highlighted in red silhouette a second before they vanish.

The movie gets off to a strong start, but does drag in places, particularly during the second half. But even given its failings, it is mildly amusing as a bad film, and admirable in what it manages to do on a shoestring.

Worth watching? I have a real soft spot for regional films or DIY horror. You may also enjoy this if you feel similarly.

Truth in advertising? The alien could well be described as a beast, and it does arrive at night. But it is also active during the day, so can it truly be called a ‘Nightbeast’? 3/5.

Santo in The Treasure of Dracula (1969)

AKA: Santo en El Tesoro de Drácula, Santo and Dracula’s Treasure, El Vampiro y El Sexo, The Vampire and Sex

Directed by Rene Cardona

Featuring Santo, Aldo Monti, Noelia Noel, Carlos Agosti, Roberto G. Rivera, Alberto Rojas, and Niña Pili Gonzalez

Our hero, the masked Mexican wrestler Santo, invents a machine that can send people back into their past lives. Somehow, this machine simultaneously broadcasts that past life onto a TV screen so onlookers can watch it for themselves.

Santo sends his girlfriend, the daughter of a prominent scientist, back to a past life. This occurs via a very 1960s sequence, where she dons a shiny golden outfit, strikes a pose, and gets on some kind of conveyor belt that takes her down a tube with a spinning spiral design inside it.

From there, she is somehow cast back to a previous century, where she was a victim of Count Dracula himself. After watching her various exploits with Dracula, Santo brings her back to the present. He and the rest of the gang (her father, and a comic relief nerd who for some reason wears a large dollar sign necklace) use knowledge gained from her past life to try to find the treasure of Dracula. But in order to get their hands on it, they must defeat a mysterious man in a black mask, who is also vying for the treasure.

This is a pretty strange entry in the Santo series. For one, Santo is barely in the first half, which follows a historical Dracula story. Secondly, this vampire section is oddly sleazy. Apparently multiple versions of this film exist, and the one I saw includes ‘sexy’ inserts. I was not expecting to see multiple bare-breasted women in a Santo movie, but in this one Dracula creates a small army of top-heavy vampire women to do his evil bidding. He gratuitously pushes their capes off their shoulders in order to mark their skin with the symbol of the vampire, leaving them totally naked, when all he really needed to do was turn down their hoods to expose their necks. He also appears to pleasure Santo’s girlfriend in her sleep before sucking her blood… as Santo and her dad calmly watch on using the past life machine! Truly disturbing.

As a secondary comment, this movie also features a lot less wrestling than most other Santo films. There is barely any wrestling in fact, just one match towards the end. This is also sort of integrated into the plot, as part of a bargain with the black masked man that whoever wins gets a map to the treasure. To be honest, the reduction in wrestling on screen is probably a good thing in terms of keeping the story moving.

Despite the strange elements, it manages to be pretty entertaining (if mostly in a cheesy way), with a surprisingly cohesive plot. It’s pretty fun if you feel like watching something quite silly.

Worth watching? Yes: it’s a fairly engaging Santo oddity.

Truth in advertising? All variations of the title describe it pretty well one way or the other: 5/5

It’s Never Too Late to Mend (1937)

Directed by David MacDonald

Featuring Tod Slaughter, Jack Livesey, Marjorie Taylor, Ian Colin, Lawrence Hanray, D.J. Williams and Roy Russell

On the surface, Squire John Meadows appears to be an upstanding member of the small community he lives in. But in reality he is a gleefully evil man, spending much of his time mistreating the inmates of the prison that he oversees. He treats them unnecessarily cruelly, including several who have crossed him, who he has had falsely imprisoned.

When a young farmer comes between the Squire and the much younger woman that he wants to marry, the Squire tries to frame the farmer for poaching. His friend takes the fall, and languishes in prison while the farmer travels to Australia to make his fortune, pledging to return to marry her once he has come good. When he does return, he must face up to the Squire’s dirty tricks yet again in order to get the girl.

This movie is an odd kind of film: a melodrama, crossed with an expose of the wretched conditions of Victorian prisons, crossed with a religious picture (one of the main characters is a priest who tries to advocate for the prisoners). The story is fairly simple, and some of the acting is pretty wooden. I’m sure that the whole thing was quite old fashioned even when it came out in the 1930s. But I think it’s still worth watching, for the main attraction: Tod Slaughter playing the Squire.

This is the first film of Slaughter’s that I have seen, and I found him incredibly entertaining to watch. He specialised in acting as villains in Victorian stage melodramas, and managed to pivot this into a film career. His acting is often cartoonishly over the top, rolling his eyes, getting around in a long black cape, and generally appearing to enjoy every moment of his villainy. Honestly, he only just stops short of twirling his moustache. I can imagine that this movie would not be to everyone’s taste, but I very much look forward to exploring Slaughter’s other films.

Worth watching? I would say yes, in order to experience the fun of Slaughter’s cartoon-style villain.

Truth in advertising? The title works well enough: 5/5.