Those that do not sleep in those stalker friendly bungalows sleep in barracks with bunk beds. There is often dispute as who gets to sleep on top and sometimes the girls sit in there see through black panties on the bed and engage in inane dialog about the ‘monster’ outside. Sometimes they boost each other up to the top bunk by shoving each other’s butt or when they hear a sound the girl on top jumps down to the bottom bunk and they both hide under the cover. This happens quite a lot actually. What else that happens a lot is shameless out of shape 60′s nude people walking about doing nothing. Just doing nothing. When they walk away from the camera they are completely nude but the ones coming towards the camera have their naughty bits strategically covered by a towel or shorts. Sometimes maybe two girls jump up and down and try to get a towel off a wall, or a group plays volleyball to run in an endless queue –showing their backsides one after the other- and jump into the pool.  Some people are not nude however. Luckily some fat, hairy guys wear some sort of shorts. There are even some black girls at this nudist camp showing that Mahon was an equal opportunity pervert and visionary.

The dialog is hopelessly ridiculous at best and I have to be honest and confess I was hitting the fast forward at the last part of the film even though it only runs about 60 minutes. I know my dad and his buddies probably thought this was hot stuff but I have become far too jaded to be able to just sit and watch a line of butts prance off to the swimming pool without at lack the minimum of believable dialog or grade z acting to hold things together. Naked women alone just can’t do it for me anymore. The ape suit is one of the worst I have ever seen but I am a sucker for a guy in a monkey suit film so the fakier the suit the happier I am. I sort of wish there had been more of the hairy little guy and some sort of attempt to explain where he came from and why the nudists piss him off so much. The color on this little film. Very bright and vibrant. You just don’t see this kind of color anymore and I think that is a shame. While basically a total cheese festand it is a little fun at times. It is fun to watch the nudity down played all the time.The only time nudity is even mentioned is when our hospital bed ridden hero Byron (played, I think, by Mahon) tells the interviewing detective how his wife Delores got him into being a nudist –a bit like Adam blaming Eve here I think- and how the whole deal started because she needed to go to the camp to get an even tan. Why is Byron in the hospital? What tragedy befell him? I think you’ll have to see that –all along with all those brazen nekked 60’s ladies- with your own eyes to believe it.

CLICK ON THE BANNER FOR MORE NECROFILES

THE BEAST THAT KILLED WOMEN THUMBNAIL GALLERY

TODAY’S EXPLOITATION FEATURE FROM GERMANY

HORRORS OF SPIDER ISLAND

THE LAST HORROR FILM aka FANATIC

1982/Director: David Winters/Writers: Judd Hamilton, Tom Klassen

Cast: Caroline Munro, Joe Spinell,  Judd Hamilton, Devin Goldenberg, David Winters, Susanne Benton, Filomena Spagnuolo( Mary Spinell)

I am certain even the most modest horror film fan has heard of Hammer and Bond girl Caroline Munro. Her long brunette hair and statuesque features are simply stunning and she has starred in some fairly memorable horror flicks like The Abominable Dr. Phibes Rises Again, Slaughter High and the shlocky Italian sci-fi film Starcrush. One of her co-stars in Starcrush was New York City veteran character actor Joe Spinell. Spinell’s name may be less familiar to many except for the cognoscenti of b-films. He is more known as a supporting actor and had small roles in The Godfather, The Seven-Ups, Rocky and Taxi Driver before he had his first starring role in the 1980 William Lustig splatter film Maniac. We will get to Maniac in the second part of this double feature and instead will start off with what is sort of a follow up to Maniac pairing Munro and Spinell up again. That film is 1982’s The Last Horror Movie or Fanatic was it was originally released as on DVD. I got a hold of the Fanatic version of the film and not the new Troma release of the movie that is supposed to include a few extra minutes of scenes and some extras including commentaries and interviews. I have to be honest I never listen to DVD commentaries. Simply never. So I do not know if I going to go out of my way to find the Troma release but we will see. I would be interested in the interviews with Spinell’s buddy Luke Walter and Maniac director William Lustig who seems to have stopped directing films (his last being Uncle Sam, which I liked, in 1997) and now produces and is the head honcho at Blue Underground DVD.

I have seen Maniac a few times actually and was excited when I recently read about The Last Horror Movie and that Spinell and Munro had teamed up yet again for a horror/stalker type of film. Of course I expected it to a gore fest like the often over the top Maniac was and was surprised to find that the film was modest in the shock department. There are some gruesome deaths and blood shed to be sure but the film is actually a rather clever poke at slasher film cliches, the world of obsessed fans and the snooty films film makers they pursue. The film is a horror film but is a comedy as well and yet never becomes a wittless spoof. The film was shot guerilla style (i.e. without shooting permits and permission) at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival and that in itself makes the film a curiosity. Slasher type films usually are relegated to a few overused locations, the most notorious being camp grounds or high school/college campuses. The backdrop of Cannes adds a little excitement to the low budget production it would not have been able to achieve in yet another sorority house. And while Munro looks gorgeous as usual and it si fun to look for the fleeting faces of celebrities scuttling from ceremony to ceremony the star of the show is Joe Spinell. He is creepy and pathetic as cab driver and loser Vinny Durand who is beyond hope in his delusions that he is a great film director and that horror queen Jana Bates (Munro) will star in his ‘next’ (actually first and only) horror feature if he could only get the opportunity to talk to her and pitch his idea. He does not get much support from his co-workers or his mom (played by Spinel’s real mother Filomena Spagnuolo). The early scenes of the film of Vinny pleading with his mother to support him were shot in Spinell’s real New York City apartment. Mom just wants Vinny to give up his obsessions and have a plate of macaroni but Vinny is off to Cannes France to meet Jana and shoot his brilliant horror film.

All he has to do now is have the chance to talk to Jana and he is certain she will go along with the project. But first he has to contact her and that is not easy as she is the hot time at this year’s film festival with the judges even selecting her performance in her new film Scream over actresses like Meryl Streep and Jane Fonda. She is always accompanied by her entourage that includes her current boyfriend Alan (played by Munro’s real life husband at the time Judd Hamilton who also wrote and produced the film). Also hovering just outside the shadows is her estranged and former mentor husband Bret Bates.  While the relationship is on the skids Bates still manages Jana and produces her films. As well Jana is the object of adoring horror fans and paparazzi. Vinny begins having melt downs as his attempts to pitch his idea to Jana or her agent are foiled one after the other. Soon bodies start popping up and Jana is stalked by a masked cameraman. Notes are sent telling future victims ‘you have made your last picture show’. Among some of the people stalked and eliminated is director David Winter (formally Mr. Linda Lovelace) who plays Stanley Kline a horror film director with a popular but revolting, in Vinny’s opinion, slasher film.

Now I am trying to change some of my approach here and I am giving less spoilers to films and shorter synopsises. I do not think there is anything terrible about spoilers but I am just trying to do something different for some reviews. I feel it is sort of hard not to give something away here and there but in the case of The Last Horror Movie there are actually a couple little twists and turns that would be ruined if I gave them away now. While the film is low budget it has some clever little moments. It works as a satire of the whole horror film business as well as the superficiality of awards ceremonies in general. In moment we will explore Mania which came out before Last Horror Movie and, as I said already, also featured Munro as Spinell’s object of obsession. While Vinny is obviously an extension or reinterpretation of the character Zito in Maniac there are differences to be sure. I would actually recommend seeing Maniac first then this film so you can see some of the similarities and, I believe, deliberate differences in the characters. Spinell is a bit funnier in this film and the conflicts with his mother who admonishes him constantly for his ‘crazy ideas’ is funny without ever becoming corny or contrived. The last line of the film between Vinny and his mom is worth the wait. An interesting little film.

MANIAC

1980/Director: William Lustig/Writers: C.A. Rosenberg, Joe Spinell

Cast: Joe Spinell, Caroline Munro, Abigail Clayton, Kelly Piper, Rita Montone, Tom Savini

For my article about the William Lustig film Maniac I simply scanned over the disk for some new screen captures and watched a few scenes over to refresh my memory. I will probably rewatch the film in its entirety soon but I have seen the movie a few times in the past and will rely more on my general impressions of the movie from past viewings than from a fresh rewatch. I first rented the film on VHS back when I lived in San Antonio Texas. It was time when I was renting stuff I read from films books I owned, like The Psychotronic Video Guide and my collection of horror books. There was no Internet back then to learn about films. The reason I watched the film was because Tom Savini did the effects and it was a period when I wanted to see every film Savini had something to do with. Sadly the guy now has decided to be an actor rather than a special effects master. In fact even back then he appeared in many of the films he worked on, such as George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Martin. Savini’s make up work on this feature are some of his goriest to be sure. One classic scene is almost universally reviled by critics and it features Savini himself getting his head blown off by a point blank range shot gun blast. It still looks horrible three decades later.

Now the real problem with this movie is not Savini’s graphic make-up effects or the over top performance by star and co-writer Joe Spinell. Both Savini and Spinell are great, as is Carolyn Munro as Anne who is pursued by Spinell’s psychotic Zito but it is with Lustig’s often shoddy direction and the overly bleak story by Spinell and C.A. Rosenberg. Of course I still recommend the film. All films here at The Uranium Café are recommended and films I like. But there is some reason I did not want to sit through it yet one time to do a better review. And yet it must say something about me that I have seen the film three or four times already. I just am not in the mood for the film’s despairing atmosphere right now is all. The same issue with the German film Necromantik. I have been wanting to rewatch it for a review but do not want to put myself through the experience right now. And I may be too harsh on Lustig’s direction since the film had a very low budget of about $350,000 and was shot, like The Last Horror Movie, guerrilla style (meaning usually with out filming permits fro locations). But some of the editing and production gaffaws are simply creative negligence. There is one scene near the beginning of the film where Zito picks up a hooker on the street and rents out a hotel room. After minimal foreplay Zito is on top of the gal strangling her to death. Seems simple enough and yet as the scene switched between shots of Zito’s maniacal face and the struggling hooker it is clear that there are two actresses being used in the close up shots. It is stuff like this that could be corrected or avoided with a little patience. And yet those glitches give the film some much needed campyness as the overall tone is unrelentingly grim and depressing.

The story is about a lonely and schzoid landlord named Zito who keeps a collection of mannequins in his apartment. He likes to adorn the mannequins with the scalps of real women and then have conversations with them in his bed. He has monologues  with his dead mother who was a cruel, over bearing prostitute. After a while Zito gets bored with his current bed partner and set off to find a new victim. Any film like this requires suspension of disbelief and acceptance of certain implausibility’s. But the relationship that develops between obviously sleazy Zito and photographer Anne is a little too much. Anne accidentally snaps a photo of Zito and while attempting to retrieve the picture, for whatever reason, Zito develops an appreciation for Anne’s work and soon he and Anne are dating and she actually seems attracted to the scum bag in some scenes. Now whether Zito is a twisted serial killer or not is beside the point. It is stretching things a little too much to think hot looking professional photographer Anne would waste much, if any, time on him or give a damn about any of his opinions on her work. The gore sequences are great if you like that sort of things and Spinell is over the top in a fun sort of way but the film lacks any of the wit or humor found in The Last Horror Movie and one wonders if Spinell is trying to deliver a film similar to Taxi Driver in which he a small role.

An interesting piece of trivia is that the song Maniac, used in the film Flash Dance, by Michael Sembello was inspired by the film. It was not, as some sites report, written specifically for the film. Nonetheless the score was disqualified for an Oscar award after it was discovered it was not written specifically for Flash Dance. In fact some lyrics were altered for the Flash Dance version. Here is an example of before and after Maniac lyrics:

Before:
He’s a maniac, maniac that’s for sure,
He will kill your cat and nail him to the door
After:
She’s a maniac, maniac on the floor
And she’s dancing like she’s never danced before

The movie was released without a rating and it is felt it would have received an X rating at the time of its release for its extreme violence. Spinell wanted to do a sequel to the film but died in 1989. It was certainly a film role only he could pull off. However that has stopped Lustig from sealiong a deal in 2009 to do a remake of the film. I just think one Maniac is enough and who in God’s name could ever weep over a mannequin wearing a bloody scalp the way Joe Spinell could?

]]> http://uraniumcafe-the.com/2010/03/21/the-uranium-cafe-double-feature-slimy-joe-spinell-stalks-poor-caroline-munroe-in-two-films-1980s-maniac-and-1982s-the-last-horror-movie/feed/ 5 http://uraniumcafe-the.com/2010/02/16/teru-ishiis-1969-banned-toei-classic-the-horrors-of-malformed-men-kyofu-kikei-ningen/ http://uraniumcafe-the.com/2010/02/16/teru-ishiis-1969-banned-toei-classic-the-horrors-of-malformed-men-kyofu-kikei-ningen/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 07:30:31 +0000 Uranium Willy http://uraniumcafe-the.com/?p=9091

HORRORS OF MALFORMED MENK (Kyôfu Kikei Ningen)

1969/Director: Teruo Ishii/Writers: Teruo Ishii, Masahiro Kakefuda

Cast: Teruo Yoshida, Yukie Kagawa, Teruko Yumi, Mitsuko Aoi

I have been delving back into Japanese cinema of the 60’s and 70’s and focusing on the Pinky Violence variety as well as the b/w noir style films by people like Seijun Suzuki. I have a few films here by director Teru Iishi but had yet to get around to watching one all the way through. I mean I tend to skim over these things for quality assurance purposes before burning them a disk then deleting the files from my hard-drive. I think I have Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf, Female Yakuza Tale, Blind Woman’s curse and the focus of this review The Horrors of Malformed Men. I will have to confess something here. I often have no clue as to the history of many of these before I download or that the above films were even all by the same director until I began doing some research for this review. I may download a film simply because I like the title or the poster art and screen captures. I will skim over the review to get some idea of when it was made and what other work the director was involved with then decide whether to use up my bandwidth and hard-drive space with the download. Usually any Japanese film made from the late 50’t to mid 70’s has a better than 50/50 chance of getting downloaded in the first place. So when I saw the review snippets about the Horrors of Malformed Men and how it was banned in its own country for some forty years and never released on VHS I was thoroughly enticed.  My first thought was how freaky could the film be in order to be banned in Japan of all places. Well the lure of a film made in 1969 Japan being banned for so long is something I personally cannot resist but there is actually a slight catch to the banned aspect of this film.

The film was indeed banned for some four decades but the ban was self-imposed by Toei Studios themselves and the controversy, if there ever was one, was centered around the use of the term ‘deformed’ or ‘malformed’ in the title and that the film displayed deformed people at a time the issue was sensitive in Japan. This sensitivity seemed to have something to do with the issue of radiation deformities following the destruction of the cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. Now it seems the film’s notoriety of being banned for so long has led to the idea that what is contained in the movies is some of the most shocking sights one has ever seen in a Japanese film. And while there are some pretty freaky scenes in the movie they, of course, pale in comparison to the over the top shock cinema coming out of Japan these days. But for the time the material is still a bit outlandish and deals with pretty taboo subject matter like incest. Of course some of the scenes may actually be a bit too much for some viewers even though it was filmed in 1969 and I am saying it is not that bad while I have seen films that have literally warped my brain beyond repair. Sometimes more than once even.

The story is taken from some short stories by mystery writer Edogawa Rampo (a pen name derived from the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allen Poe) and from his 1932 novel The Strange Tale of panorama Island. The film is a mystery story actually and tries at times hard to be a whodunit.  Actually the film suffers from this and the ending really messed up an otherwise great piece of artsy Japanese cinema when a minor character in the film shows up and reveals he is in fact an undercover police detective. He then unravels the series of events and clues that led him to his final conclusions in a typical detective film fashion. All the main characters gathered together in the parlor (okay, in this case they are all in a cave full of flesh eating crabs but it is sort of the same thing)  and the brilliant detective unfurls his narrative much to the shock and awe of all present. The only problem is you are thinking to yourself “who the hell is this guy!” Other than that irritating flaw and the other corny aspect of the ending I will discuss later this is in fact a pretty good film. It is well shot and the colors are lush and vibrant in each scene. The acting is good and the score is very effective. As one reviewer observed the film has the surrealist film making elements of people like Alejandro Jodorowsky and the film’s dream like quality may not appeal to everybody. So what is the big mystery then that unravels in the cave at the film’s end?

Well I must remind you that much of the story is a little hard to follow at times and one is strung along at best in many instances and if do not enjoy this sort of thing it may be tough to keep your attention focused. I had a hard time but often settled for the brilliant and haunting images and figured the film would maybe make sense at the end. Well, it made less sense by the end but the movies opens up with a man named Hitomi a patient in a strange asylum where women danced around drugged and naked and bald men stare at him from a distance and plot his murder. Hitomi has no idea why he in the institution and all he has are a couple jumbled memories in his head: a recurring scene on a beach with a wild haired man with strange fingers and a lullaby melody. Hitomi is forced into a situation where he kills the creepy bald guy in self defense and somehow manages to escape from the asylum and is soon seeking information on his own past and who he really is. He meets a young girl who performs at a circus where Hitomi seems to have picked up and odd job. She is able to identify the lullaby but before she can provide him with more information a knife is thrown in her back. You know, right as she about to utter the first syllable of the secret he needs to hear. And then to make matters worse Hitmoi decideds to pull the knife out and then everyone happens upon the scene and believes he murdered the girl. Man, I hate when that happens.

While traveling incognito (wearing an eye patch) Hitomi happens to notice a newspaper headline about the passing away of the head of the powerful Komoda family. He is startled to see the picture of the man who is his dead ringer. His curiosity is piqued and he heads to the coastal area where the family’s business empire is situated. Further coincidences fall into play when a birth mark on his foot, he discovers from an old masseuse, is identical to one on the now dead Genzaburou’s foot. The birthmark is in the shape of a swastikia but the image does not have the same evil connotations in the Orient as it does in post the post Nazi Germany west. The story is situated time wise before the war during the 1920’s I believe. Well, with all these events piling up and the fact that the family house is within walking distance of Hitomi now he does the most logical thing a person in his situation can do; he sneaks in the cemetery where Genzaboru is buried and takes his body from the grave and hurls it into the sea with a suicide note and then returns to the grave and assumes the identity of the head of the Komoda family. It is a little shaky a first but soon everyone accepts the fact that a mistake was made and Genzaboru was mistakenly buried for dead. There are various levels of intrigue in the Komoda household as Kitomi gets closer and closer to the secrets of his true identity. Poisonings and strange deformed men groping bathing servant girls top the list. Soon Kitomi begins to realize that the answer to his mysteries must lie on the island where Genzaboru’s father Jogoro lives in self-imposed exile conducting unknown experiments. The experiments are basically the delusions of a madman who is transforming normal people into malformed mutants. Seems he has long been bitter because of his own congenitally deformed hands and now wants to make a sort of master race of deformed men who will, I gather, rule the world someday. Not only will they rule the world but they will have sex with all the normal beautiful girls out there. A demented but inspiring dream I must admit.

It is not far fetched to guess that Hitmoi is actually Genzaboru’s twim brother who was sent away as a young lad by Jogoro to study medicine so that later in life he could return home and help his dad create mutants. Hitmoi is having none of it. He is man of strong moral fiber. Of course he does not mind having an incestuous relationship with his sister who was only recently a male/female Siamese twin experiment but we all have our shortcomings don’t we. All these years Jogoro’s wife has been chained up in a damp cave eating crabs. Seems she had some hanky panky with a man with normal hands and this really sent Jogoro further over the edge of sanity he had already slipped off. This is told in monochromatic flashback sequences. The films spirals out of control at the end when, as I mentioned earlier, a Charlie Chan type scene occurs where an uncover cop unravels all the truth as everyone stands around listening with mouths agape. I felt this was totally unnecessary. Further at the end we are treated to a type of theme I often see in Asian films. The evil Jorgoro suddenly breaks down in tears and confesses his love for his wife who he kept chained in a cave for a couple decades and forced into acts of cannibalism on her dead lover. She starts wailing and crying and then he is wailing and crying and the scene drags on way too long. I have seen this sort of ending too many times in Japanese films and Asian films in general. The bond of blood or love is deeper than the viscous and sadistic acts that severed the pair and it the end they cry and weep and say “I have always cared for you and loved you, forgive me for keeping you chained in dark isolation in a cave with live crabs as your only source of sustenance for twenty something years. I did it because I loved you”. With some response like “Sure, I understand. I always loved you too and forgive you”. Then there is some double suicide of Hitomi and his sister because society could never accept their deep, but forbidden, love. Hell, I think he only knew the girl for a week or so and half of that time she was co-joined mutant. Well, those little flaws only add to the film’s strangely grotesque appeal. The photography is wonderful and it is an early example of Japan extreme cinema by a director  who would serve as an inspiration for the much more extreme and shocking Japanese cinema that was to unleashed over the coming decades. The themes are dark and moody and the movie ends on a down note but the over all ride is enjoyable.

]]> http://uraniumcafe-the.com/2010/02/16/teru-ishiis-1969-banned-toei-classic-the-horrors-of-malformed-men-kyofu-kikei-ningen/feed/ 2 http://uraniumcafe-the.com/2009/08/01/ted-v-mikels-1968-camp-classic-w-tura-satana-the-astro-zombies/ http://uraniumcafe-the.com/2009/08/01/ted-v-mikels-1968-camp-classic-w-tura-satana-the-astro-zombies/#comments Sat, 01 Aug 2009 10:38:38 +0000 Uranium Willy http://uraniumcafe-the.com/?p=6336

THE ASTRO-ZOMBIES

1968/Director: Ted V. Mikels/Writers: Ted V. Mikels, Wayne Rogers

Cast: Wendell Corey, John Carradine, Tom Pace, Joan Patrick, Tura Satana, Rafael Campos, Joe Hoover

I have to admit that I have been on a real super B-movie or Z-grade film roll for a long while. God knows I watch more of this stuff lately than I can keep up with as far as posting goes. I may soon be shifting gears for a couple posts and do some posts on some other films I have seen lately, like Mr. Majestyk with Charles Bronson, or the Getaway with Steve McQueen or a Japanese film like Woman of the Dunes or Onibaba.  For a while comic book and music posts are on the back burner simply because they take a lot of work and I am not sure that that is what people come here for. It is also easy for me to do b-movie posts because  I simply love these old B-movies and love writing about them and promoting them. And few Z-grade films have a more special place for me than Ted V. Mikels’ bewildering The Astro-Zombies (sometimes listed as simply Astro Zombies. The poster art says Astro Zombies or Astro-Zombies-with hyphen- while the opening credits say The Astro-Zombies). I picked this up long ago on VHS and saw it a couple times and really knew little about it other than who John Carradine and Tura Satana were. I will have to admit that this film is not fort everyone, but I love it. Yes, there is tons of padding and wasted opportunities. I feel Tura Satana is not used on screen enough and John Carradine is fun as yet another mad scientist but spends too much time tweaking equipment and babbling pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo to his mute and imbecilic henchman and not enough time really being insane and misguided.

But the film is ultimately good and unintentionally campy fun for the super cheese cognoscenti and the dialog is priceless. Whether or not the film was actually intended to be campy or not is a topic for debate I suppose. The dialog is all the more an oddity because the script was co-written by Wayne Rogers, Trapper John from TV’s M*A*S*H. Roger’s was also co-producer and a lot of the property used in the film belonged to him. The film is torn to shreds usually in sites online that I always thought were supposed to pander this stuff. It is a bad film and going into the movie with that knowledge will not make it any better. If you are not a fan of really bad cinema then steer clear. But if you are the type who love seeing greasy haired, stooped over henchmen torment tied up girls in bikinis for no explainable reason, or monsters that consist of phony looking rubber masks with no expression and all of it topped off with the zaniest dialog ever then you will enjoy the time wasted with this grimy jewel. Ted V. Mikels is still alive and working and  I read on his website that is actually planning an Astro-Zombies “part III”, to follow the 2002 straight to DVD release Mark of the Astro-Zombies, which starred Tura Satana. This will not be the only film Mikels film to be featured here at the Café. Coming eventually: The Doll Squad (again with Tura Satana), Blood Orgy of the She Devils, and The Corpse Grinders. You have been informed, or warned depending on your personal tastes.

The film starts off with a day for night scene of a woman driving a sweet looking white Ford Mustang convertible with historically relevant shots of the dashboard. She parks her car in a suburban house and soon is attacked and killed by an Astro-Zombie. There was some special reason she was singled out and murdered but I forget that reason right now. You always know an Astro-Zombie is about to attack because of the loud, strange music that announced his arrival. Now you may well be wondering what the hell an Astro-Zombie is exactly. Well simply because I have seen this film about six times does not mean I understand anything about it okay. One professor DeMarco (a mad scientist played by the king of mad scientists John Carradine) was recently dismissed from NASA because of his Astro-Zombie. Seems he could not discriminate between the body of an air force officer and a cadaver and was let go from the team. That will usually do it. The basic idea seems to be that the Astro-Zombie would actually someday be a type of cyborg astronaut that could be controlled by radio wave transmissions from the ground. Why this is necessary is never explained.

DeMarco of course now works in secret with his mute, imbecilic and hunched over associate Franchot (William Bagdad who played in a couple other Mikels’ features) and his visions of what the Astro-Zombie can ultimately accomplish has increased in grandeur since he got canned from his cushy job. He now imagines that all the knowledge of the worlds great minds can be assembled into some sort of computer chip type device and implanted onto the Astro-Zombie and this will be of great assistance to the astronaut while in orbit. Franchot has the miserable task of harvesting body parts for DeMarco’s experiments and at the beginning of the film he seen gathering parts following a car accident. Luckily he must have standing by the shoulder of the isolated stretch of road just as the car plunged over into the ravine below. When Franchot is not busy with this grisly task he is either listening to DeMarco’s convoluted scientific ramblings, watching DeMarco tweak circuit boards for minutes at a time or pursuing his own private experiments on bound up bikini girls.

A group of men associated with DeMarco and his former experiments at NASA have began to worry that the recent wave of mutilation murders around LA may be connected to DeMarco. The team is headed by Dr. Holman (played by character actor Wendell Corey who was now ill and battling the late state alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver from which he would soon die). Brought to assist in the undercover type operation is Eric Porter (Tom Pace from the Girl in the Golden Boots) is one of those sort of handsome guys of the time who can’t really act even when given a good script and believable lines and overacts at being either charming or tough. The office room dialog between Holman, Porter and the other guys is simply great. I am going to try and rip some dialog samples and post those at the bottom if they are successful. Well things are even more complex than they seem already because DeMarco and his secrets are being sought by dragon lady Satana (played by Tura Satana, the tough talkin’ gal who immortalized the Russ Meyer character Varla in Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!) who is a spy from an unnamed country. Her switchblade welding heavy is Juan (Rafael Campos) who also happens to be an electronics genius.

There are some dealings with a underworld people with Russian accents that go askew and a couple guys get stabbed and ran over in a parking lot. Later lascivious Satana is lying on the sofa, smoking from a cigarette holder in her slit gown that all oriental spies wear around the house, listening to the tapes made by DeMarco about his Astro-Zombie experiments. For some reason I cannot fully recall some CIA guys had a hunch that earlier some shady dealing were going to go down at a shady nightclub. They manage to let the Russian spies get killed off without noticing but later wind up at Satana’s hideout in the suburbs and wind up getting caught, tortured and killed off themselves. In one great scene Satana puts out a cigarette on the CIA guy’s face. Too bad there were not more scenes like this of Tura Satana acting evil and merciless. Later a cute lab assistant is killed by an Astro-Zombie back at the space center I guess. Security must be lax.  We know the girl is going to die because she is too sweet and volunteers to take the shift for her college Joan (Janine Norwalk) so she can out with lover boy Tom. We also know when she will die because the loud Astro-Zombie approached music begins seconds before the girl has her blouse ripped off and then repeatedly stabbed. The death scenes in Mikels’ films are not usually too brutal and the sex stuff is played down. He never made a nudie as far as I am aware of. The death scene here is a little more over the top than is typical but still not gory by any stretch. Probably not suitable for Mormons.

There is plenty of padding in the film that may be painful for some viewers. What does it say about me that I actually replay these types of scenes and watched them over? There are long stretches of “action” shot in the laboratory with nothing much happening other than noisy blood transfusions and Franchot conducting his experiments on some poor, struggling girl in a gold bikini. We never find out what these experiments are but in one scene Franchot is holding what looks like old radio transistors and smiles perversely as the camera cut back and forth between him looking at the transistor and the girl tied to the lab table. Sadly we never discover what he does with the transistor but I bet there were some discomfort involved. In a sequence that happens in low budget cop films more often than I can to recount undercover agent Tom Pace figures that the Astro-Zombie was actually trying to return to the lab to murder Joan and killed the other girl by mistake and will probably return and asks Joan to be a decoy. She is not a trained policewoman nor is she given a gun but she seems to agree that this is the best way to trap the beast and goes along with the plan. The Astro-Zombie is a tricky devil and never shows up but instead suddenly appears, with blaring music, in Joan’s bedroom while she is in her slip. Tom is outside monkeying with the circuit breaker but manages to chase off the Astro-Zombie. During the conflict the Astro-Zombie’s solar cell is knocked off and in desperate need of power grabs a flashlight and sticks it in the little hole on his forehead.

Juan has figured out where DeMarco’s hideout in the suburbs is by analyzing transmissions to and from the Astro-Zombie and the cops figure it out some other. Needless to say everyone winds up at Demarco’s place at the same time. I should make clear that there are two, yes two, Astro-Zombies. The one that is running around killing everyone is the one that received the brain of a deranged criminal so you have to expect that sort of thing. The other Astro-Zombie is still being put together but once he is completed he will be the physically, intellectually and morally superior human that all Frankenstein type mad scientist long to create. Of course they always screw up the first prototype by putting a blasted deranged criminal’s brain into the body!

Of course fast thinking Tom decides it would be a good idea to bring Joan to the place where the murderous monster is kept and then just leave her alone waiting in the back yard without even a gun, telling her to just wait and not move. Satana and her gang arrive first and in a pretty unequal knife fight Juan kills Franchot. He himself is later shot when he runs out into the open firing his pistol like James Cagney at the cops. DeMarco suddenly decides he must destroy the evil Astro-Zombie and Satana offs him with her silencered pistol. She winds up dying along the Astro-Zombie in some power box hanging on the wall. And that about wraps it up except for the heroes all standing together at the end and saying some lines about DeMarco not understanding human emotions. The closing sequence is made is the same as the opening and I think is pretty cool. Little toy robots walk around the haze made by one of those old smoke bombs you got at the 4th of July and the soundtrack is some interesting though dissonant noise. But why take my word for any of this when you can see the entire film here at the Uranium Café Matinee. Certainly one of my favorite Grade-Z films. I may poke some fun at it but I enjoy this film and appreciate Mikels’ energy and enthusiasm. Like Ed Wood Jr. he just wanted to make movies and often invested everything he had into getting the things made and distributed. He usually did the production, direction, editing and camera work. Okay, he may not be Orson Welles, but this is great stuff.

Conference Room Dialog

Download audio file (Conference_Room_Dialog.mp3)

Demarco 01

Download audio file (DeMarco01.mp3)

Demarco 02

Download audio file (DeMarco02.mp3)

Death by Astro Zombie

Download audio file (Death_By_Astro_Zombie.mp3)

Satana Takes Care of CIA Guy

Download audio file (Satana_Takes_Care_Of_CIA_Guy.mp3)

The Ted V. Mikels Interview By Ed Tucker

Hidden in a small industrial complex just a few miles off the Las Vegas Strip is an unassuming building that could easily house a lawn service or pest control office. Upon entering the front door though, visitors are immediately overwhelmed by over thirty years’ worth of movie posters, press books, lobby cards, and photographs lining almost every square inch of available wall space. This museum-quality display of vintage memorabilia highlights the career of legendary cult filmmaker Ted V. Mikels, a true American original who turned his varied talents and driving desire to make movies into an eclectic catalog of feature films and a motion picture career to be reckoned with. It’s hard to believe that a man best known for “blood orgies” and “corpse grinding” could be so friendly and cheerful! Ted Mikels is a walking encyclopedia of the film industry with an enthusiasm for his profession that is nothing short of infectious. I had the extreme pleasure of sampling some of this knowledge and insight when I was a guest in his Las Vegas office and studio.

ED Tucker: Ted, I would like to begin this interview by making two observations that became apparent to me as I was researching your career. The first is that it appears you have made more movies than any other cult filmmaker I have researched.

Ted Mikels: I think so. I know I can lay claim, unequivocally, that I have made more movies than any man alive who has not been financed. That’s a hundred and some odd credits. An actor can spend a half a day or a day on a movie and do three movies in a week. When you write, produce, direct, light, shoot, edit and market it takes you darn near a year on every picture. When you are doing all the key positions it takes at least ten months to complete a full-length feature.

ET: The advantage to doing everything yourself, though, is that when you are done you know you got exactly what you wanted.

TM: You never get exactly what you wanted but you get as close to it as you can get.

ET: The second observation I made was that, in your career, you appear to have worked with more of your fellow cult filmmakers than any other person.

TM: I think that comes about because writing, directing, producing, shooting, and editing leaves you open for involvement in other people’s movies. No one had heard of Ed Wood at the time I worked with him but I was asked to come in and light one of his movies. I was teaching the cameraman how to shoot so he could get his union card. Other people who did not have the money go full bore on a picture with a big crew would ask me to come in and shoot because I had the equipment and, above all, the knowledge. I was contacted by a lot of directors who had not directed before. They needed a cameraman who could come in and help them direct. I don’t mean telling the actors how to perform, I mean helping them with camera set-ups and compatible camera angles. That is where a lot of first-time directors fall down.

ET: The Ed Wood film you mentioned was “Orgy of the Dead”?

TM: I don’t think it was called that when I was involved. I do know that, when I was there, Criswell was in it.

ET: I believe the film was known by multiple titles in production including “Ghouls and Dolls”, “Nudie Ghoulies”, and “Orgy of the Damned”.

TM: They also went in and added a lot of footage of topless girls dancing in the woods. I didn’t shoot that.

ET: Did you actually work with Ed Wood or just with Stephen Apostolof?

TM: Ed Wood was there in the rooms and hanging around but nobody knew who he was back then. The first time I even heard of Ed Wood was when somebody sent me a picture around 1991 or 1992 and said here you are on a crew with Ed Wood, what was he like to work with? I said I don’t even know which one is Ed Wood, how do I know what he was like to work with? Steve was a friend of mine and I was just helping him out by teaching the cameraman. He was fast and efficient and became a big shot as a cameraman. He did “Dallas” and other big shows but I gave him his first job as a cameraman.

ET: Did you work with Stephen Apostolof on anything else?

TM: Steve and I were friends for a long time but I don’t think I worked with him on anything besides that. He came to one of my screenings in Hollywood not too long ago. Someone even said that he has moved to Vegas but he hasn’t communicated that with me. Our movies were a little different.

ET: He was more into soft-core.

TM: Yes, I try to stay with the basics – musicals, dramas, martial arts, action / adventure, horror or science fiction. I never stepped outside of those bounds.

ET: What was your involvement on “Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”?

TM: I put up a big chunk of money on that picture. I flew in to Florida and met all the people. One of the young producers came up to me and said let’s go to the set and watch them shoot. I said no, I’m going to go to the lab and see what you’ve shot. I had money at stake and I had committed to releasing the picture. I had the final say on the work print and the answer print because it was on me. The lab was on me too, which at one time was up to $16,000. I don’t even know if Alan Ormsby knows this. We got to the lab and the guy said what do you think and I said you have to throw this out. He said what do you mean, we’ve been shooting for a week. I said if I’m going to be involved as executive producer, and I never took credit for that, you’re going to have to throw out every foot of this and start over. The poor guy they had in from New York, and this is no put down, he was better equipped to shoot in a studio with cameras and good help but this was outside. When I first got there they were filming the ship and they were lighting it with a single lantern. They were also doing a scene with a girl biting someone lying by a big log. I asked them what they were doing and they said it’s a moonlight scene. I said that’s not the way you light moonlight and I made them redo it. I actually set up a drawing board and was teaching their lighting people how to light. The scenes with the hands out of the Earth – that takes special kinds of lighting.

ET: Was there a reason you didn’t take screen credit on “Children”?

TM: I have always felt that if I wasn’t the director or producer I didn’t need screen credit. I’ve done a lot of things that I didn’t receive any credit for and I didn’t care. That was my company, Geneni, that you see on the posters and that was really all I cared about at the time. If I had my company name on it, I figured that was enough credit. I had so many credits to my name by that time that I really didn’t need any more. If anyone ever questions my involvement, I have way too much to tell not to have been there. When the film was released we traveled everywhere and had openings where I secured the advertising and promotion. The uncle of one of the film’s producers, Gary Goch, had put up money for the film and he came to my office wanting to know why we couldn’t collect the money from the theaters faster. I told him when you deal with theaters you get your money when they send it to you. That really got under my skin that he wanted to know why we weren’t collecting the money faster. At that time I had a lab bill of about $65,000 that I was responsible for so I told him I would give the movie back to him if he would take over my lab obligations. I flew back to Miami to sign the paperwork, it was all very friendly, and after it was over I gave them back my full interest in the movie.

ET: Let’s jump forward now to “The Undertaker and His Pals” which you are listed as having re-edited.

TM: EOLA made the film and then they brought it to me. I had just started my distribution company in 1966 and had not chosen a movie to start with. What I had at the time I didn’t own the rights to so I was looking. I got invited to a screening of this film with other distributors and everybody walked out! They asked me what I thought and I said it may have possibilities. So I decided to have my own screening with other people and they said you’ll never get this in a theater, you’re wasting your money, if you take this on for distribution you’re going to lose! I went through the film and took out all of the footage that was shot during actual operations where they took out livers and gall bladders. It was really too gory for the average person because it was too real. You can put things in a movie if it’s fake and people know it’s fake but this was real. I took all of that out and cut it down and made some other little changes in the editing bay. It ended up only being sixty something minutes. I ended up releasing it as a second feature for “The Corpse Grinders” because, by that time, “Undertaker” had already run its gambit.

ET: So “The Undertaker and His Pals” actually did play on its own theatrically?

TM: Oh yeah, it played for three or four years. It was banned in Boston! We got big kicks out of that.

ET: You actually did leave a little of the operation footage in the picture, which is interesting because it really doesn’t fit the tone of the rest of the picture, which is almost playful.

TM: Playful and campy, the other stuff was just a little too serious. I’ve always considered myself an entertainer so if you are going to entertain people let’s keep it as campy and humorous as we can.

ET: This was 1966 when you released “Undertaker” and then in 1968 came what I consider to be one of your most accomplished pictures, “The Astro-Zombies”. You had Wendell Corey, John Carradine, and Tura Satana in that one.

TM: I had $37,000 to make that film from Wayne Rogers and his partner, Kenny Altos. I put my blood, sweat, tears, and soul and thirteen months of my life into that film. I worked hard and never got a dime out of that film even though it made hundreds of thousands of dollars for other people.

ET: How could you do that on $37,000? Most of that had to go to pay the name actors didn’t it?

TM: That was everything I had. The actors worked very reasonably. It was a budget that you couldn’t even dream of now. You have to remember, I was the writer, producer, director, and editor. I supplied all the equipment and ended up several thousand dollars in debt and I didn’t get anything. I owned a third of the movie but I got beat out of that too.

ET: How did Wayne Rogers, best known as Trapper John on the television series “M.A.S.H.”, get involved in “The Astro-Zombies”?

TM: He saw my first picture “Strike Me Deadly” and he wanted to put me under a contract. I looked at the contract and decided it was not for me but we did things together anyway, even though I had not signed the contract.

ET: How did you come to cast John Carradine?

TM: I had met him on a project I worked on for a fellow named Michael Drucksman in Washington called “Genesis”. He narrated it. That was in 1962.

ET: “Astro-Zombies” was released in 1968 and then re-released in 1971 with an entirely different ad campaign. How did that come about?

TM: Wayne and Kenny had a chance to sell it to Jack Harris for a little bit of cash. It didn’t include me. I delivered all prints and all the materials I had to Jack. I had already played “Astro-Zombies” on its own and on a few dates paired with “Corpse Grinders”. After that I did the “Final Dimension in Shock” package which was “Corpse Grinder”, “The Undertaker and his Pals”, and “The Embalmer” which I rented from Allied Artists.

ET: So “The Embalmer” was just a straight pick up? The film was black and white from 1966 and originally called “The Monster of Venice”.

TM: Yes, it was the undertaker, the embalmer, and the corpse! It made the trilogy work. I had to pay someone a lot of money to find that film and then I had to pay something like $25,000 to Allied Artists to use it and $25 every time we showed it. I also had to buy 50 to 75 additional prints of that because they only had 28 prints. I had to buy additional prints of “Undertaker” and “Corpse Grinders” too. I had to have matching numbers of prints on all the films so I could send them out as a triple bill. I spent about $150,000 to $200,000 having prints made and then that much again in shipping them all over the country. When I left the castle in Glendale, I dropped prints of these films – cans, cases, and all, into a big hole on the property and covered them with dirt!

ET: So there is buried treasure on that property.

TM: Well, those cans weren’t waterproof and a lot of water seeps into the ground out there. Those prints would be invaluable today.

ET: Was the idea to make “The Corpse Grinders” inspired by what you had the ability to do at the time?

TM: No, “Corpse Grinders” was the only script I ever purchased right on the spot. Arch Hall came to me with some scripts and I thumbed through them. I can immediately sense if a script if something I would be interested in. I saw that one and I liked the concept. It wasn’t called “The Corpse Grinders” then; it was something like “The Cat and the Cannery”.

ET: (laughs) Hey, that’s a pretty good title too!

TM: It was an intriguing title but at a later time I changed it to “The Corpse Grinders”. I don’t remember if Arch had suggested that as one of a list of alternate titles or not but I decided I wanted to call it “The Corpse Grinders”. I asked Arch how much he wanted for the script and we went across the street to my bank and I told the bank manager to pay him. I had the script for about a year or two and it evolved over time. I actually made “The Corpse Grinders” because I was one of the first people to do home video. I had engineers trying to figure out how to put my 35mm films on reel to reel black and white Sony decks. Telecine didn’t even exist then or if it did I had no knowledge of it. I got the rights to a number of things and did phenomenally well. These decks had to be threaded, so I asked Sony if they could come up with something like an audio cassette. They told me they were working on it, but it was still five or six years away. I had about 100 hours worth of material for these decks and we did so much business so fast but it just blew out of proportion. We got into so much debt that we had to close the business. I was working with two guys who just took off and left me with $475,000 in debt. I went to the lawyer that was handling all this and said I would make him a deal. If he could get all these people who were trying to sue me off my back, I would do what I do best, which is make movies, and I will pledge half of all income from this movie to clear these debts. That’s how “The Corpse Grinders” came about! I had no money, $1700 was all I could dig up but I did give half of the money from the movie to pay those debts.

ET: So that’s why the corpse grinding machine looks like it was made out of a cardboard box like refrigerators come in!

TM: It was never cardboard, it may have looked like it but it was really very sturdy. We had to dump bodies into it! It was plywood and two-by-fours and lawn mower and bicycle parts. People jokingly called it cardboard, but it wasn’t. It may have jiggled a little bit when you put people down a ramp into it but it wasn’t built to be a real cat food processor! (laughs).

ET: So how much do you think you spent building the machine?

TM: I keep thinking it was about seventeen dollars! It was odds and ends from a lumber yard. The lawn mower was two dollars from a second-hand shop and the ramp was nothing. In fact on “Corpse Grinders II”, the ramp alone cost me $200 but it was a genuine wide steel roller ramp from the Post Office.

ET: “The Corpse Grinders” was your first film with Sherri Vernon wasn’t it?

TM: Yes, she was my make-up girl.

ET: She was a beautiful woman; she reminds me a lot of Katherine Ross.

TM: We are still the best of friends and talk all the time even though she moved to Hawaii twelve years ago.

ET: So how did “The Corpse Grinders” do when it was released on its own?

TM: “Corpse Grinders” did more business than any of my other movies in my whole life. It was the only movie I have ever heard of that was contracted by movie theaters and drive-ins as many as six times on percentage. Normally a theater that rents something on percentage once would bring it back as a second feature for a flat rate of $25 per week. That just tears up your prints.

ET: How did the triple bill do?

TM: It just knocked them crazy! Everywhere we played we out-grossed everything! In Hollywood we had a 27 theater break and we out-grossed everything that was playing at any price. We out grossed “Tora, Tora, Tora”, a 26 million dollar movie. We just made them look silly. We did a quarter of a million dollars in business in 10 days and that was at 50 and 75 cent ticket prices! We had so much going for those pictures. We had certificates that people had to sign to get into the theater. We had a nurse taking blood pressure. We had a corpse grinding machine in a lot of locations. We had an ambulance out in front of the theater with flashing lights. We did everything that you could do to promote a movie.

ET: Was there a pressbook for that release?

TM: Yes there was but I don’t have one. Someone brought one to a show one time and had me sign it. I only have the 40 X 60 because someone sent it to me and said you above all people should have this.

ET: I didn’t even know the 40 X 60 existed until I saw yours. Most of the paper on your pictures is pretty hard to come by. There isn’t any of it that I would call common.

TM: The prices have just gone crazy. I only made a thousand posters for each of my films up to “10 Violent Women”. That is one thousand for the entire world and when you think about it that really isn’t very many. A poster for “The Corpse Grinders” just went for $275 in Australia! By about 1973 and “The Doll Squad”, I was sick of the National Screen Service destroying my one sheets. They would keep them for thirty-six months and then burn them, so I started holding on to more of my posters after that. I never printed more than 1000 posters for any of my films until “10 Violent Women”. I printed 2000 of that one but I lost about four cases of them in a flood along with some for “The Worm Eaters”.

ET: The poster for “The Worm Eaters” is pretty goofy but then that is a pretty goofy movie!

TM: It was a goofy movie! It’s one I didn’t direct although Herbie Robbins (the credited director – ET) has been quoted as saying I helped him direct a lot of it. I was working on editing a film I had shot at that time. I would go out to the “Worm Eaters” set each day around 3PM and half the time, after a 7AM call, they hadn’t shot one shot yet! I tried to jam it through to get all the shooting we needed to do that day done before sundown. We hustled!

ET: That film certainly seems to have a lot of the Ted Mikels’ “flavor” to it.

TM: I guess that’s why Herbie says I had more to do with it than I let on. A lot of people say it is their favorite film. That was a favorite rental of the University of Washington for a long time.

ET: Your next major film after “The Corpse Grinders” was “Blood Orgy of the She Devils” wasn’t it?

TM: Yes, I had to fight with the newspapers over that one! I had to go into San Francisco and fight with the newspapers because they would not print the title “Blood Orgy of the She Devils”! They would call it “She Devils” or anything else but “Blood Orgy of the She Devils”. I went there in person to talk to the editor and said, look, this is nothing but a campy little witchcraft picture!

ET: Do you attribute some of the reason “Blood Orgy of the She Devils” was not as successful as “Corpse Grinders” to these advertising problems?

TM: I think so. That wasn’t the only place that wouldn’t print the title plus we had put our intensities at that time into releasing “Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”. My sales manager was close personal friends with Bob Clark and he put his focus on “Children”. That kind of hurt us, I felt kind of bad about that because “Blood Orgy” should have done better. Now, at conventions, the two biggest sellers I have on DVD are “Blood Orgy” and “Corpse Grinders”. People remember “Blood Orgy” because in San Francisco they used to play it at midnight shows like “Rocky Horror”.

ET: Did “Children” do good box office?

TM: Oh yes, we did good. Once again we did great promotions. Alan Ormsby made these head masks and we had people standing out in front of the theaters wearing them and a girl leading a zombie by a chain. I have pictures where we went to a theater or drive-in and had that promo going on.

ET: Was there ever any thought to doing another double or triple bill with “Blood Orgy” and “Children”?

TM: Well I gave “Children” back to them in 1974 but I think we did release it on a few bills with “Corpse Grinders” or “Astro-Zombies”. It’s hard to remember after all these years but somewhere in storage I have boxes of theater tear sheets where it shows what we had playing. Would you believe that, at one time, I stood on Hollywood and Vine and looked down the street and I saw three of my movies playing on Hollywood Boulevard at that same time! Now you tell me, what big-time movie producer can say that?

ET: Do you recall what three movies they were?

TM: Well, I think it was “Girl in Gold Boots”, “The Corpse Grinders”, and probably “The Doll Squad”.

ET: When you made “The Doll Squad” you switched your formula back to something more similar to “The Astro-Zombies” and used name actors.

TM: On “Doll Squad” we raised a little bit of money from individual people. We put together about $100,000 in cash and the rest I did on my credit. With the lab bills and everything I think it came to about $256,000 total for the picture. That was heavy and it took all of my credit to do it. We had to use all of the foreign sales just to pay it off. It was tough because we had seven bad weather breaks. We had a terrible break in San Francisco, lightning storms, thunder storms. The streets were empty except for water!

ET: In the long run, though, wasn’t “The Doll Squad” fairly successful?

TM: Yes, it was. MGM got word from the screenings that we had finished it and they called me in four times to look at it. They were interested but I told them I would not make a deal with them unless I got a $350,000 cash advance and a worldwide distribution deal. They said hey, if we go for it, that’s no problem for us. I didn’t tell them I didn’t have the $36,000 to finish up the editing so they said let us see it when you get a little bit further. I went to my sub-distributors to raise the money to finish the editing and they got that territory to release the movie in under that contract. In effect, I gave them the rights to sell it in their territory subject to our agreement. The day that I got my first answer print, MGM must have gotten word from the lab that it was finished. I picked the print up from the lab, put it in my trunk, and was driving home when I got a call on my car phone; I was one of the first guys to have a phone in his car back then before cell phones, from my secretary saying MGM wanted to see “The Doll Squad”. I said how do they know it’s even finished, the print is still wet from the lab! I said “sure” and within an hour a driver from MGM was there to pick up the print. They called me back in about two hours and said we’re ready to make a deal. They met my terms, a $350,000 cash advance and worldwide distribution! I had to tell them that I felt bad but I had given away some of the distribution rights. There was silence and then they said they would get back to me. They called back about a half an hour later and said Ted we’ll wait for your next picture. That would have made a world of difference in my career! In retrospect, when the people I had sold the rights to found out, they said they would have been happy just to get their money back but I kept my word. We almost got an Academy Award nomination for the theme song from “The Doll Squad”.

ET: I didn’t know that.

TM: “Song for Sabrina” was just marvelous. I was told by Nicolas Carras that it was selected for top ten consideration for the Academy Awards but it was dropped when the top five were selected. I just got an E-mail from the UK yesterday asking where you could buy the soundtrack to “The Doll Squad”. I just might put it out because I still own the rights and am good friends with the composer.

ET: How long after “The Doll Squad” came out was it until it was re-released as “Seduce and Destroy”?

TM: It was actually about two or three years. My friend, Clyde Knudsen, from Dallas said that if I would give him all my prints, he would re-release it as “Seduce and Destroy”. It is the identical movie except that the new title was inserted. Do you know that, here it is some thirty years later; he just got around to sending me some trailers and pressbooks from “Seduce and Destroy”?

ET: After “The Doll Squad” you had “The Worm Eaters”, of course, but about a year later you did “10 Violent Women”.

TM: Yes, that was very successful but one of the most grievous things I have felt about the whole industry involved that film’s distributor in New York, Aquarius Releasing. They never sent me any money for the picture, nor did they return my prints. Aquarius was sending me letters, which I still have, saying how successful the picture was and that they wanted to buy the rights to six of my films for home video!

ET: What happened to the film you were working on called “The Space Angels”?

TM: We created eight spacecraft and filmed them. Rob Maine, who did a lot of work on big movies like Star Wars, did those. When it went into the trades that I was going to do a film called “Space Angels”, we had the most response ever for any film I have ever done. We had people coming in all day long wearing what they thought would be a space costume. It was really interesting because what I was looking for was women who were six foot two and over. I had created these seven and a half inch heels for these six and a half foot women and I wanted them all in one-foot tall beehive hair dos. So I wanted eight foot tall girls and I found some! We got some of this shot, not the part with the girls because we never really finished casting. It was an ambitious undertaking but we thought we had the money to do it and we didn’t. We had a company that was going to put up just under two million dollars to make the movie. Someone from that company took the script to Paramount and they said Ted Mikels is nuts he can’t do that picture for two million dollars! Two million would have made all the movies I have ever made in my life! Of course I could have made that movie for two million – I could have done it for a lot less than two million! We lost the money. It was a private corporation and they knew nothing about moviemaking. Rob Maine and I put together all those spaceships and filmed all those stop motion scenes for nothing. Not only that, I just used one of those spaceships in “The Corpse Grinders II” all these years later!

ET: That was what I was going to ask you. Could any of the footage you did be used in another film?

TM: That was the only spaceship that we had that I really liked. We shot it originally on 35mm and I had it put on ¾ inch tape. I had that transferred to Beta SP and we put it in the movie!

ET: Speaking of “Corpse Grinders II”, you’ve had a mini-resurgence recently. You have had two sequels, “The Corpse Grinders II” and “Mark of the Astro-Zombies”, come out in the past two years and you just finished a new film.

TM: Well, I finally decided that I am no longer going to look for money. I have all of the knowledge. I teach lighting, I give seminars on movie making, and I lecture to people by the hour. The places I lecture at love me because they say I am the only person they have had who does all these things and can answer all their questions. I decided no more with the money. I shoot everything now on Beta SP, which I can light very quickly. Give me a couple of tall individuals who can understand English and I can light in a fraction of the time it used to take my big crews to light. I love shooting, lighting, writing, directing, editing, and even performing. I decided a few years ago that from here on I am no longer going to wait for financing because it never comes. I’m going to buy everything I can on credit cards, don’t miss any payments, and just keep doing picture after picture after picture until good things happen! I’m on this kick now and I’m just going to keep going. I may wear out but I’ll never rust out!

ET: Tell me a little bit about your latest film, “The Cauldron: Baptism of Blood”.

TM: Jay Gowie, who did the masks for me on “Mark of the Astro-Zombies”, asked me if I wanted to hear about a story idea he had called “Baptism of Blood”. He had about a one paragraph outline along the lines of “Blood Orgy of the She Devils”. I gave him a “story inspired by” credit on the film. I started writing the script and the more I got into it, the more I decided I was going to make this film. If you watch the “making of” film on this movie, you will get an idea of how much work went into it. We made all the props for it, the sacrificial tables, and the big columns with fires on top. We shot all of the coven dancing scenes with anywhere from eighteen to twenty girls dancing. We really got into this film and I have a feeling it is going to be one of my favorites. It’s long, too. It runs about an hour and forty-three minutes so with the fifteen-minute “making of” film it’s right at two hours. It was quite an undertaking to go into without financing. That doesn’t mean it didn’t cost anything. We had five dancing scenes with the coven girls in this one where “Blood Orgy of the She Devils” only had two.

ET: So for this film you distilled all the popular elements of “Blood Orgy”?

TM: Yes, we really did. I am thinking that if we get a really good response to this film I may do another sequel called “Mara: Queen of the Black Witches”. That was my original title for “Blood Orgy of the She Devils”. That would be so easy for me to write I could start Monday!

ET: It would be the final chapter in the Ted Mikels’ witch film trilogy! Do you have a project in mind next?

TM: At the moment I am torn between a number of things. The people I am talking with now think I should do “Corpse Grinders III” and they would love it if I did another astro-zombies movie. They are also talking about a movie based on my castle life. I just wrapped “Baptism of Blood” and finished the DVD. I’ve had three days now without making a movie and it’s bugging me! I’ve told everybody that by next week I won’t be able to stand it. I’ll start another movie if I have to take my cameras into the backyard and shoot the snails and the bugs! I will start something. I have one that I want to do that I wrote years ago at the castle called “The Women of Castle Reagh”. I would also like to do “Doll Squad II” but that would take money.

ET: So you would really want that to be a proper film?

TM: I do. I really want that to be a mainstream proper film. We got away on “The Doll Squad” with the girls just doing a little martial arts. I knew a little bit and showed them but now with “Charlie’s Angles” and all the other films doing all kinds of martial arts we would have to have a lot more. If I did the castle film I am almost certain I would have to go to England. The castle that I lived at in Glendale for fourteen years has undergone a lot of new owners and renovations. I was originally going to do it there and use a matte screen painting to put it on the edge of a cliff. If I did it now, though, I would have to have financing. If you’re going to do a period piece with costuming these days you have to have financing. I would need a half a million to make the film, which is peanuts in Hollywood. The fact is you get put down in Hollywood for only wanting a half a million!

ET: You need to write up a budget for a five million dollar film and then make ten movies!

TM: I’ve had that thought many times! I think the key is to start another movie right away. I was going to drop everything and go into full distribution but I cannot compete with the big companies that are thoroughly dug in on international marketing and distribution. Hollywood has changed. The whole industry has changed. It’s a different time now and I think I would be smartest if I could make a deal with some of my movies, get some money, and start another movie right now. Yesterday was my birthday and my significant other, Dr. Wendy Altamura, told me that when people ask me my age I should tell them I’m immortal!

ET: Sitting across from you at this table right now, I would believe it! Thank you so much, Ted.

TM: You’re very welcome.

“Velveeta Las Vegas! The Ted V. Mikels Interview by Ed Tucker” is ©2004 Ed Tucker. We wish to sincerely thank Ted V. Mikels for participating in this interview series. All photographs used in this article are &copy2004 by Ed Tucker and are used here with permission. All original graphics, unless otherwise noted, are creations of Nolan B. Canova. All contents of Crazed Fanboy™ and Nolan’s Pop Culture Review are ©2004 by Nolan B. Canova.

Ted V. Mikels: A Video Primer

By Ed Tucker

The following list of films is in no way intended as definitive, nor is it based on any criteria other than personal recommendation. This is merely a guide for those unfamiliar with Ted Mikels’ films to give them an entry point into the career of a unique film maker. All titles included in this list, except where noted, are available on VHS and DVD at http://www.tedvmikels.com. This website also includes a great selection of photos and original memorabilia for sale and is highly recommended.

The Undertaker and His Pals (1967) – A macabre story of two motorcycle-riding, knife-wielding, shiv-shaving, eye-gouging, arm-twisting, chain-lashing, scalpel-flashing, acid-throwing, gun-shooting, bone-breaking, pathological nuts and their pal the UNDERTAKER! Wow, the tag line for this film pretty much says it all! This mixture of graphic horror and oddball comedy is similar in tone to the original EC comic books like Tales from the Crypt. Robert Lowery, best known for playing the caped crusader himself in the 1949 serial “Batman and Robin”, stars as a low rent detective out to solve a series of bizarre murders that all lead to a cut rate mortuary run by the highly underrated Ray Dannis. While not technically a Ted Mikels’ film, “Undertaker” is infused with many of his signature touches. It is not available through the website but can be found from a number of discount retailers on DVD.

The Astro-Zombies (1969) – This is probably my personal favorite of all of Ted Mikels’ films and I consider the one sheet for the 1971 re-release of this title to be one of the coolest movie posters of all time. John Carradine, Wendell Corey, and Tura Satana are a triple threat B-movie dream cast in this science fiction tale of synthetic organs and solar powered zombies! This film has something for everyone!

The Corpse Grinders (1972) – Common house cats turn psychotic and attack their owners after being fed cheap cat food made from human corpses! This horror / black comedy mix is probably Ted Mikels’ most famous production and features some weird characterizations and interesting lighting effects.

The Doll Squad (a.k.a. Seduce and Destroy ) (1973) – Another B-movie dream cast of Michael Ansara, Francine York, Anthony Eisley, and Tura Satana in a tale of female CIA operatives out to stop saboteurs. This is a fun little action adventure film with plenty of babes in jumpsuits firing machine guns. See how many similarities you can spot between this and the “Charlie’s Angels” television series which premiered a few years later!

10 Violent Women (1982) – This combination of just about every exploitation movie theme you can imagine is also one of Ted Mikels’ raciest and bloodiest films. A group of female miners get fed up with doing dangerous work for minimal pay and stage a jewel heist. From there this tough girl, crime drama, caper film becomes a drug dealing, women in prison, sexploitation picture!

Ted V. Mikels Collector’s Reel – This 100 minute compilation contains fourteen trailers from some of Ted’s best know films plus “making of” featurettes for two of his most recent pictures, “The Corpse Grinders II” and “Mark of the Astro-Zombies”. This is an excellent introductory overview for anyone unfamiliar with Ted Mikels’ work.

Ted V. Mikels Drive-In Delites – Return to the hey day of motion picture exploitation and drive-in movies with this wonderful compact disc. This ten track CD features musical cues and radio spots from Ted Mikels’ most famous films. The highlight of this compilation is the final track, “Solid Gold Countdown to Showtime”, an incredible mixture of popular rock tunes hosted by a phony DJ who conducts an even phonier interview with the “director” of the “Final Dimension in Shock” film package. This is a one of a kind must have for cult film and drive-in fans!

TODAY’S MIND NUMBING FEATURE:

THE ASTRO-ZOMBIES

TRAILER FOR ASTRO ZOMIES

Post coming shortly on this great American classic.

]]> http://uraniumcafe-the.com/2009/07/24/the-uranium-cafe-matinee-ted-v-mikels-astro-zombies/feed/ 4 http://uraniumcafe-the.com/2009/07/23/ron-ormonds-strange-1968-swamp-thing-flick-the-monster-and-stripper/ http://uraniumcafe-the.com/2009/07/23/ron-ormonds-strange-1968-swamp-thing-flick-the-monster-and-stripper/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:53:50 +0000 Uranium Willy http://uraniumcafe-the.com/?p=6167

THE MONSTER AND THE STRIPPER

1968/Director: Ron Ormond/Writer: Ron Ormond

Cast: Ron Ormond, Tim Ormond, Peggy Anne Price, Sleepy LaBeef, Georgette Dante, Ronald Drake,  Jack Horton,  Pauletta Leeman, Harris Martin

AKA: THE EXOTIC ONES

As hard as it may be for the uninitiated neophyte to conceive there is a class of “cult”* film makers whose technical skill and dubious vision are on a lower rung of the film making ladder than even Ed Wood, Jr.. In fact the title “worst filmmaker of all time” has never really been suitable for Ed Wood, Jr. since there are moments in his films that show some degree of craftsmanship. Of course I am talking apples and oranges here, okay. Tim Burton made an embellished biopic of Wood’s life and career of the technical nature Wood himself could never imagine and I could not imagine myself trying to argue that Woods is a better film maker than Burton. But better does not mean more fun in a kooky sense of course.  Burton could make a film that is an homage to bad film making but could never make a film as genuinely bad as Jailbait . Why you ask? Okay, maybe you didn’t ask but pretend you did. Because when Ed Wood, Jr. made Jail Bait or Plan 9 from Outer Space he was trying to make a good film and fell short of the mark. It is the failing to reach the lofty goals of a mediocre film maker that makes Plan 9 so wonderful. I still find most of Wood’s catalog pretty deserving of being watched over when there is nothing else to do with life. I can dust the house or watch Bride of the Monster again. Not a tough decision for me folks.

But in an even more remote and frozen orbit from the world of conventional film making are a band of true outsiders that churned out what are often called Z-Films. If B-Movies refer to films made outside the normal system of film production, distribution and politics of Hollywood on super low budgets with less known actors then Z-Films represent a world even outside the rules and codes of B-Movies and their arcane creators and unknown casts constitute a veritable sub-culture of film making. I doubt anyone sets out to make a “Grade Z Classic” the way Ted V. Mikels did with The Astro -Zombies or Al Adamson did with Dracula vs. Frankenstein but somewhere events beyond reasonable human control (such as the collective lack of any film making talent on the part of the entire cast and crew) come into play. And yet there is something genuinely entertaining about the films of folks like Ray Dennis Steckler, aka Cash Flagg, and even Herschell Gordon Lewis that can provide a certain portion of the population a sound evening of pseudo-surreal film watching. One could argue that this same said portion of the population is in desperate need of shock therapy or even lobotomies but that brings the subject matter a little too close to home to make me feel comfortable. So lets move on and discuss a truly odd film I had the masochistic pleasure of watching recently called The Monster and the Stripper, aka The Exotic Ones by the eccentric Ron Ormond.

* I do not like the term cult movie much lately as it is overused these days but is still most applicable at times. It has become a way to sell unsalable DVDs is all and the term has lost some of the categorical usefulness it once possessed. I long ago removed it as a category description here at the Cafe.

Like many other film makers of his selective ilk Ron Ormand’s personal and professional life followed a course much like one of his eclectic films.  If you are really interested there is a ten page write up on the man and his films from an article that appeared in Michael J. Weldon’s Pyschotronic Video Magazine. One of these days I am going to begin some posts that provide mini-bios of the lives of influential Uranium charged film makers and I will use info from the above essay to give an overview of Ormond’s life. I know you can’t wait that long and ten pages is way too much to read of the cuff so I will try to give a very rough sketch from the info I have lying here next to me. He was born in 1910 as Vittorio Di Naro and changed his name to Ron Ormond because of the influence of mystic Ormand McGill on his life. Ron Ormond had a fascination with things mysterious or religious and even spent nearly a year in India with McGill researching and writing the book Mysteries of the Orient. McGill and Ormand would collaborate on some other books, that would probably be found in the occult section of a bookstore, with titles like The Master Method of Hypnosis, The Art of Meditation and The Magical Pendulum of the Orient. Later in life Ormand’d religious leanings would take a more Southern Evangelical slant when, after surviving a plane crash, be became born again and followed the hell fire and brimstone preaching of the Reverend Estus W. Pirkle.

Ormand’s contributions to the world of film began to be more substantial when he began working with cowboy star Lash Larue (so named because of the bullwhip the black clad good guy used in his buts with bad guys) in the late 40’s and 50’s. He produced and wrote many of the Larue and other B-Western films of the time for his Western Adventure Inc. production company. He married June Carr and later little Timmy Ormand was born. The times changed and so did Ron and June Ormand’s film making ventures. In the mid to late sixties they churned out a handful of low budget exploitation style films that seem to belong in a little niche all their own. While most people may have never heard of Please Don’t Touch and Untamed Mistress I hope that they will be a little familiar with Mesa of Lost Women, featuring some of the old Ed Wood Jr. entourage such as Delores Fuller and Lyle Talbot (doing the narration).

Ormand’s film direction took still another bizarre twist when after the aforementioned near fatal plane crash he began making Christian propaganda films for Estus W. Pirkle with titles like The Burning Hell and If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do? He died in 1981 and like many exploitation style film makers his work remained lost until VHS and DVD brought them to a level of popularity he never knew, nor expected to receive,  during his living years. I have seen Mesa of Lost Women a couple times and am trying to download If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do? (Jeremiah 12:5) and Please Don’t Touch Me but the film I just watched and the one this post is about is The Monster and the Stripper and seems to be the film he is most remembered for, alongside Mesa of Lost Women. The title is certainly enticing and it is also known under the less provocative title The Exotic Ones. The film is like that line from Ghost World when the character Rebecca says “Its so bad its good” and the totally cynical Enid responds with “Actually it so bad that’s its gone past good and back to bad again”.

Like I said, the title is enticing and sounds pretty sleazy but the movie had me using the fast forward often, which is something I seldom do. I was aghast to discover that some people to churn out posts on a daily basis actually fast forward through the film just to get to a review on it. I actually enjoy the fare I watch and tend to do more rewinding and if the film is unwatchable I eject it. The problem with TMATS is that some scenes are fairly watchable Z-Grade material, at least for people to prefer root canals with little anesthesia or think Ed Wood Jr. may have actually been possessed of some sort of genius. The problem really is the dance sequence that are too many and go on too long, sometimes one after the other just filling up reels. They are of the Tease-o-Rama type variety and in small doses could be fun but after a while they really become simply way too boring. What I want to see in a film like this is lots of cheesy acting and corny dialog and goofy monsters. And yes, plump, pastie teasing dancing girls in a sleazy strip club as well of course but it is all just filler here obviously.

The film opens up with shots of New Orleans and the type of over the credit narration that is supposed to give the film a sort of mondo, true life feel. That’s you are about to be exposed to the sights and sounds of some hidden under belly of life in America that few people even know exist, much less have ever witnessed. Soon however we are transported into the less than murky and grimy interiors of Nemo’s Strip Club, run by said Nemo who is played by shade wearing Ron Ormond himself and billed as Vic Narno. His business partner is played by June Ormond and some of the dialog exchanges between consist of them staring into the camera and mouthing a line then cutting to a scene where the other, looking into the camera, reacts. June Ormond sometimes keeps slipping glances into the camera as she is talking and even seems to wink or nod to the camera and it is a little odd. Nemo’s business is slowing down due to competition on the strip he is working and in one scene he has his goons pour a spittoon over the head of a toothless rival who owes him some money. He is watched constantly by what must be a vice cop (Ronald Drake) who wears a goofy straw hat and spews out patronizing advice to one nice girl, Effie, who, in his opinion, does belong in this ratty business. She is played by Peggy Anne Price and she simply wants to be a singer and we are treated to a couple performances of her doing a sort of poor man’s Pasty Cline that are pretty hayseed sounding and do not seem to fit in a burlesque type club. His main dancer is the garishly eye-lined Titania (Georgette Dante, a real live exotic show girl who stayed friends with the Ormands long after the film) who is rotund and arrogant and becomes jealous of good girl Effie stealing a little of the lime light from her.

But Narno needs more to draw in customers and on the suggestion of his right hand man Marty (Jack Horton), who looks like he owes every Elvis record ever made, they decides to go into the swamps and bayous around New Orleans and capture the “Swamp Thing” that has been recently killing off hillbillies (or swampbillies) and ripping the heads off livestock. They figure this is just the sort of thing people will money to come in and gawk at. They hire a swamp kid named Timmy (Timmy Ormand and I ahve a picture on my hard-drive of this kid in the wildest high-waters you have ever seen and will  get that up when I do my Ron Ormond post someday) as their guide and the group of four men are soon whittled down to two by the Swamp Thing, a cave man looking brute played by rockabilly singer an guitar player Sleepy LaBeef (some MP3 samples at the end of the post) who lives under piles of Spanish moss. One of the best scenes in the film is when the Swamp Thing rips the arm off one of the hunters and beats the man to death with his own arm. Okay, I thought it was one of the best scenes anyway. There is some irony to this scene actually since the man beat to death was Cecil Scaife who was a PR man for Sun Records and at the time working with Columbia Records. So happens Sleepy LaBeefe (called Sleepy because of his droopy eye lid) was a Columbia recording artist. The dialog and acting in this sequence are simply the “best’ in the film. Anyway, they catch the Swamp Thing, with a hypo-gun I think, and take him back to the Strip Club. The local police seem to have no interest in the fact that a murderous swamp beast has been captured and soon he is on stage rattling the cage bars as the audience stares in shock. Timmy is the only person the monster connects with, for some reason we never understand, and as well he has a monster style crush on good crooner Effie. Naturally the bad girl Titania gets on his bad side when she does her fire act and torments him with fire. In one scene the Swamp Thing bites the neck of real chicken and lets the blood drain over his body. Some trivia here is that the 6’7 Sleepy did not have the heart to actually kill the chicken and so Georgette Dante (Titania in case you forgot) wrung it’s neck off camera and flung it back to Sleepy.

After a pretty disappointingly non-sexy cat fight between Effie and Titania the monster escapes and kills Titiana then terrifies a bunch of dancing girls who all look like they’re laughing at the lumbering, loin cloth wearing Sleepy LaBeef, who is supposed to a pretty funny and hospitable good ol’ boy in real life. The beast then squishes the skull of Narno while the vice cop in the straw hat just watches, with gun in hand, and winches. In the next scene we are told that the monster escaped and no ones knows where it is. Guess it just walked down Bourbon Street and back to the swamps without causing any commotion. The film ends with another Russ Myersesque narration about life in New Orleans. The film actually did rather well meaning it probably broken even) on the drive-in circuit where June Ormond arranged autograph sessions with the dancers (including of course Titania) and other cast members in the concessions area. Not that the Ormonds saw much of the returns on this or any of their  60′s  films and soon the shady dealings of the exploitation film business, along with his near fatal plane crash (he may have been the pilot of the small private plane),  all contributed to his conversion to Southern style Christianity and his very bizarre film work with the Rev. Estus W. Pirkle. Happy to report that I finally got in a watchable copy of the apocalyptic If Footmen Tire You What will Horses Do? More on that stuff another day. And lastly I have included a couple MP3 tracks from country swamp rocker Sleepy LaBeef himself, taken from his own website.

MP3 SAMPLES FROM SLEEPY LABEEF

JAMBALAYA
Download audio file (jambalaya.mp3)

WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN
Download audio file (willthecirclebeunbroken.mp3)

She Demons

1958/Director: Richard E. Cunha/Writers: Richard E. Cunha, H.E. Barrie

Cast: Irish McCalla, Tod Griffin, Victor Sen Yung, Rudolph Anders, Gene Roth, Leni Tana, Charles Opunui

In some ways 1958’s She Demons is like one of those exploitation styled stories that would appear in the sweaty men’s action magazines of the sixties where overly viral white guys rescued, or tried to anyway, captive white girls from the clutches of Nazis, Imperial Japanese soldiers, commies, pirates or wild animals of various sorts. The story is one of the most outlandish ideas ever and so it lands a place here at the Uranium Café. The plot is the tried and true group pf travelers stranded on a desert island one with some sort of menace lurking in the jungles. This story line, along with the car breaking down in the countryside with a dark mansion or castle nearby, is simply one that will never disappear from the hack script writer’s box of two or three tricks. The story involves a small group of boaters who was washed ashore after their small boat is destroyed in a hurricane, in the Caribbean I am assuming, and they find themselves pitted against a group of well dressed and well supplied Nazis some thirteen years after the war has ended. I reviewed The Flesh Eaters here and that film also had a similar story, of a group of travelers who land off a small island in the Atlantic and find there a brilliant but mad Nazi who is continuing experiments from the war period in hopes of selling the results to the highest bidder. However the mad Nazi in that film did not walk around the island in starched, black Nazi regalia nor was he supposedly still being supplied by the defunct fascist Nazi regime, by secret submarines yet, as the goose stompers in this flick are. Well before we explore this unbelievable film in detail lets have a look at some of the people involved in its creation and production.

The film is directed by the man who brought to us, in the same year of 1958, what is considered to be his greatest contribution to the world of cheese cinema Frankenstein’s Daughter (a review on that wonder will be here at the Café eventually, do not fear) Richard E. Cunha. He was born in Hawaii and served in the Army where he learned his trade by making training films and newsreels related to WWII. He would later work as cinematographer for various TV shows (Branded and Death Valley Days among them) and direct some strange low budget cult horror and sci-f- classics, mostly from the late fifties and early sixties. He seems to speak with pride about how his films averaged $65,000 and no more than six days to make. His other films include Missile to the Moon and Giant from the Unknown.

When I sad above that the lurid and macho cover art for the men’s action mags of the sixties usually depicted overly virile men I did not mean to infer that this film’s lead man was some such heroic he man. In fact Fred Malkin (Tod griffin) is really an odd character who gets a regular tongue lashing from spoiled rich girl Jerrie Turner (played by the original Sheena, Irish McCalla) and can barely hold his own in a fist fight with a fight Nazi named Igor. He is simply never convincing as a tough guy even though his shirt is opened up at the chest and his sleeves are rolled up. Also along on the shipwrecked crew are the To his credit Fred somehow as convinced Jerrie’s rich daddy to finance the whole trip which is to find an island where animal like humans exist like something out of Dr. Moreau. And that brings us to Jerrie who is simply one spoiled rich brat and we have to wonder why she even came along on the trip. When everyone is washed upon the beach after their ship sinks in the storm she can’t stop complaining that Fred did not salvage enough of her wardrobe. She whines on and on and refuses to spend even one night on the beach and never seems concerned about starving to death or dying of dehydration. While Fred seems to act tough with her and flings some insults back we all know who the boss is here, Jerrie and her daddy’s money.

The last two members of the castaways (neither is a professor or millionaire) are two nervous looking ethnic stereotypes who are both wondering which one is going to die off first. The boat’s black or Somoan captain is Kris Kamana and he really looks more like a struggling alcoholic to me than someone who would be manning the yacht of a millionaire. He seems superstitious and senses some bad mojo on this seemingly uncharted island. Though uncharted and basically unknown it is home to the band of Nazis and is used by the US Air Force in fly over bombing tests. Finally is the wise cracking Asian Sammy Ching (Victor Sen Yung) who is doing all he can to make sure he does not wind up the dead non-white guy and survives to be the comic relief providing side kick. And if you have to choose between the grumpy kill joy  Kris and the always ready with a snappy one liner Sammy who would you choose? Victor Sen Yung is noted as sharing many of the Number One Son roles in the Charlie Chan movie series when they weren’t being played by Keye Luke (Master Po in the Kung Fu TV series)

The only other noteworthy character in the film (we will exclude introducing the henchman Igor) is the lead bad guy, since all Nazis are bad, is one Colonel Karl Osler (Rudolph Anders) and this guy must have been the inspiration for the character of Col. Klink in the Hogan’s Heroes TV series. Actor Anders has a long list of film credits and most of them all seem to be commanders or “doctors” with pompous sounding German sounding names.  He sports a monocle and black SS type uniform that looks extremely sharp and neatly pressed at all times, I mean considering he is on a desert island and it is 1958 and the Third Reich was all but destroyed thirteen years before. I love explanation sequences in old horror and sci-fi films. You know the scenes where the scientist starts giving a long winded and jargon filled break down of the situation according to all the laws of modern science, or even better, the scene where the mad doctor or villain discloses his plans and aspirations to his captives. Well this film has simply one of the best scenes ever of Col. Osler rambling on and on about the nature of his experiments on the islands and how they are connected to his old research with the krauts in some concentration camp back in the good ol’ days. It all has to do with something skin graft experiments and he uses the jungle girls (more on them shortly) as guinea pigs and hopes to perfect the technique to restore the once lovely fact of his wife, Mona, who was horribly disfigured in a lab accident. When I say disfigured I am trying to be nice here. Her friggin’ face is gone! He supplies his captive guests with all the details of his evil monolog since he feels they will never leave the island and I guess he just had to let I all out since he has been cooped up for way too long with the same old jungle girls who don’t speak English or Naziese, his freaky looking wife and his crew of lackies who are a lot of obsequious yes men if ever there were. So, lets discuss the story in a general fashion and see just why the hell I love this strange film so much.

The story, as I have already disclosed, is about a small yacht that is being charted by Fred Malkin for the purpose of finding an island that, according to legend and drunken sea tales, is home to a race of half animal, half human creatures. I cannot figure out if Jerrie is his girlfriend or not since they never seem to have a kind word for one another, but somehow Fred manages to talk her dad into financing the “expedition”. Why exactly Jerrie decides to come along is a total mystery since she is miserable from the word go. The rest of the “seasoned” crew is the sorry excuse, but most likely affordable, for a sea captain Kris Kamana and an Asian Hop Sing style tag along if ever there was one named Sammy Ching. Actually the Asian guy here does not descend into as many stereotyped mannerisms and dialog as one might expect form the period and is, s far I am concerned, the most likeable character in the film. And while Kamana appears to be a black man it is also likely he is a Samoan but I am not sure any of that matters because I think is obvious from the get go that what this guy is eventually is dead meat.

They run into a hurricane and I wonder if they had bothered to check the weather forecast before setting sail since hurricanes don’t usually appear out of nowhere. The storm looks like a bad one according to all the stock footage we are treated to. The ship goes down but as is usually the case everyone is washed upon the shore of a tropical island. How does that happen? I would think even with life jackets you are going to drown in hurricane waters strong enough to sink your ship. However Sammy somehow manages to save the blasted radio, the heaviest piece of equipment there is. Jerrie is at it in no time and Fred is yapping back at her for being the spoiled rich brat she is and the two ethnic minority members stare at each other wondering who will go first. Luckily it is the worst actor in the cast Kris who goes down first. They see a formation of stock footage jets fly over head and receive a transmission that they will return later and perform a bombing run on the island. They find him later after exploring around a bit, searching for the sources of foot prints they found in the sand, with spears in his body and the radio smashed to pieces. This all bodes poorly.

They head back into the jungle and after a few confusing adventures, such as Sammy finding his own college fraternity pin and the trio finding a freakish girl face down in a river, they are drawn to some primitive bongo and congo drums playing the type of untamed drum rhythms you heard at Ricky Ricardo’s club on the Lucy Show and find a group of robust white girls (the Diane Nellis Dancers) doing a “native” dance in a jungle clearing. It seems to be more like dance you would find on one of those burlesque Super 8 movie reels and I simply have to wonder what the origins of this tribe of sexy, white are. Are there really lost tribes of women like this on uncharted Caribbean islands? What is more amazing is what happens next. A squad of Nazis show up and recapture the girls as it seems they had all just escaped from their holding pins where they are kept for Col. Osler’s experiments. That is correct. These girls all just escaped from Nazis performing freakish experiments on them and what do they do? Do they high tail it to the furthest reaches of the island and hide quietly in the jungle? No, they start doing a loud Las Vegas show girl routine a hundred feet from the Nazi camp.

The girls are taken back and one is whipped to death by Igor as an example to the others and our trio of castaways decide to sneak into the camp and find out what is going on. The movie then becomes a series of the group’s attempts at breaking into the Nazi compound then getting captured and then escaping again and yet getting recaptured.  Anders is great as the jeering and unethical Nazi madman and in one the most memorable scenes of the film he actually tries to seduce cold fish Jerrie by dressing her up in a black gown owned by his disfigured wife and plying her with alcohol. While Anders seems to be playing the scene for fun McCalla’s lack of acting ability is totally apparent. Nicholas Carras’ music score is decent enough and the cinematography by Meredith Nicholson is pretty good as well after the scenes begin to take place in the jungles and in the secret laboratory and compound. I felt his camera work on Cunha’s Missile to the Moon and Daughter of Frankentstein was far better however though She Demons displays plenty of his skill within the low budget 50’s and 60’s horror films genre. The She Demons themselves are interesting works and the scene where one turns her head after being transformed by Col. Osler’s experiments actually made my wife jump and cream a little. The make up is obviously pretty low budget with the long, gangly teeth really being the weak point but in a way the creatures are actually a little freaky. The scene where Osler’s wife’s face is revealed is pretty well done and reminiscent of Karloff in The Mummy, except that Mona’s rotted face is far uglier. Through it all Sammy keeps the wise cracks coming and Fred is simply a wuss in my opinion. Maybe one of the wimpiest “action heroes” to appear in film.

The film ends strangely, as if things haven’t been strange enough. Of course Osler’s wife get upset because of his interest in Jerrie and set them all free after they have been imprisoned yet again by sneaking them the key to the door lock. She never seemed to have a problem with Osler experimenting on the native girls with experiments that were usually fatal but she suddenly has an attack of conscience when he sees him trying to put the move on Jerrie in her black dress. While She Demons are running amok and our trio are making their escape the US Air Force starts a bombing run on the island and the laboratory is blown up and the lava that Osler harassed for his experiments is set loose and fries him. Was this not a major issue in the past? These bombing runs and why in the world did it just happen that this was the one to blow the lab to bits? We will never know I suppose. Fred, Jerrie and Sammy make it to the beach where finally Jerrie seems to have fallen for Fred but I have no idea why. She is still a shrew and he is a sissy boy.

Of course I poke fun but this is a pretty good low budget film that draws on some classic traditions such as doctors driven to restore their disfigured wives, strange experiments gone awry on a desert island and shipwrecked survivors who find themselves in the middle of all the madness. Usually considered Cunha’s second best film compared to Daughter of Frankenstein but I think Missile to the Moon is often overlooked and a review of that film iscoming eventually.

SHE DEMONS TRAILER

SHE DEMONS DANCE SCENE

These videos are to accompany my upcoming post on the 1958 Richard E. Cunha film She Demons. Somehow I suddenly find myself writing longer and loner reviews of these camp classic films and I need to pace myself and not rush through them. I feel my ability to write about these films has developed over the last year and I ahve learned to not just do the review to get it over with. I uploaded these clips to my Viddler account from my trailer collection as an alternative to Youtube which is still blocked here in China. I really prefer the look of the Viddler player and I am not sure about how fast it will play since all videos play slow for me. The finished post will be up shortly so enjoy these for now and please check back and enjoy out my article on this fascinating little little piece of low budget horror.

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