IT CONQUERED THE WORLD

1956/Director: Roger Corman/Writer: Lou Rusoff

Cast: Peter Graves, Beverly Garland, Lee Van Cleef, Sally Fraser, Dick Miller, Jonathan Haze, Taggart Casey

I had originally planned to do this as a guest post Nate Yapp’s awesome Classic Horror site. I asked Nate for a film he needed reviewed and he suggested this one but as I am a master of procrastination way too much time has now gone by and if Nate reads this I apologize. Also my own sites suffer from neglect and regular posting and need to have something added to them once in a while as well. So thanks Nate for the offer and sorry for my scattered brained approach to horror-cult film blogging. I do not think I have the focus to be a dependable guest blogger. If you do not know about his site please go check it out. Like The Uranium Café it focuses on classic-cult-cheese classics and its focus stays primarily on films and offers guest posters a chance to to add a review to the archives. My restless nature has my site venture off into music and comic books sometimes as well and soon I am beginning a new series on movers and shakers behind the scenes of ‘great’ films, music and artwork. Some people in my bulging draft folder now include Sam Katzman, Paul Blaisdell (who did the makeup effects for this posts film), Edward L. Kahn and others. I went through a period of ‘blogging depression’ and apathy.  I think I am over that for now and Uranium Willy is back in the saddle for the time being but no doubt will slip off again.

Today’s post features a film that is surely among the classics of great American cheese. It Conquered the World may be one of the best example’s Roger Corman’s amazing ability to squeeze everything possible from a low budget and tight production schedule. Like many low budget horror/sci-fi films from the period there is a lot of dialog, rather than nail biting action and suspense, to carry the film. Now you either love all this dialog or you hate it. Many people find it all unbearably boring while others, like your humble  reviewer here, find the corny dialog, crazy scientific explanations and pompous messages more enjoyable than the action scenes. Just look at this sample from the film’s ending where  hero Paul Nelson (played by the late Peter Graves) muses over the actions of his misguided friend Tom Anderson (Lee Van Cleef):

He learned almost too late that man is a feeling creature… and because of it, the greatest in the universe. He learned too late for himself that men have to find their own way, to make their own mistakes. There can’t be any gift of perfection from outside ourselves. And when men seek such perfection… they find only death… fire… loss… disillusionment… the end of everything that’s gone forward. Men have always sought an end to the toil and misery, but it can’t be given, it has to be achieved. There is hope, but it has to come from inside, from Man himself.

I think he could have added “Goodnight sweet Prince” at the end there and it would have become as timeless as anything the Immortal Bard himself would have penned.

SEE HOW IT CONQUERED THE WORLD HERE >>

TODAY’S EXPLOITATION FEATURE FROM GERMANY

HORRORS OF SPIDER ISLAND

SEE HORRORS OF SPIDER ISLAND HERE! IF YOU DARE! >>

DRAGSTRIP GIRL

1957/Director: Edward L. Cahn/Writer: Lou Rusoff

Cast: Fay Spain, Steven Terrell, John Ashley, Tommy Ivo, Frank Gorshin

One thing that could never be said of director Edward L. Cahn was that he was a lazy man. 1957 was an average year for the man during his highly productive period of the 50’s and early 60’s. He churned out six feature films that year (one film less than ’56 but one more than ’58) and among those films were Invasion of the Saucer Men, Zombies of Mora Tau and this post’s feature Dragstrip Girl. His actors were kept busy as well. Dragstrip Girl’s stars Steve Terrell and Frank Gorshin would also star in the campy but wonderful sci-fi comedy Invasion of the Saucer Men. In many ways Dragstrip Girl is typical of much of the juvenile delinquent and hotrod flicks of the time. The kids (many who look about 25 or so) really do seem all that rebellious and most parents would welcome these ‘hooligans’ as teenagers to cope with. Heck they even wear suits and ties to the swingin’ alcohol free parties held at some other kid’s parent’s house. But make no mistake, these kids are troubled and tortured and just looking for kicks and something to rebel against. But like many of Cahn’s low budget features Dragstrip Girl is a noticable cut above the rest. Cahn actually knows how to frame a shot and as usual the b/w photography is remarkable. The pacing does not drag and the acting is better than average for a b-movie feature from 1957. In particular are the performances by the three central characters, the dragstrip girl herself Louise Blake (Fay Spain), good kid Jim Donaldson (Steve Terrell) and bad boy Fred Armstrong (John Ashley of the 60’s bikini films with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello). Ashley is excellent as the jealous rich kid who always wants to one up his working class buddy Jim but can never seem to do it. Not on the high school football team and not now with new girl and hotrod lover Louise. Of course Louise has no problems with playing the two competitive lugs off of each other for her special form of fun and kicks.

MORE OF THE DRAGSTRIP GIRL HERE >>

I thought I would balance my recent post on Dave Sheridan’s Tales from the Leather  Nun with another remarkable underground comic from the early 70’s, Rick Griffin’s Tales From the Tube. Griffin is maybe best known for his Grateful Dead postsers and album covers as well as his posters for many San Francisco area music and surfing events. He helped to launch the underground comic movement with his contributions to ZAP. His style was highly detailed and a discernable cut above most of his underground peer’s work. Rick was a surfer himself and Tales from the Tube his intricately drawn tribute to the surfing world. The book is drawn with all the strange mystical symbols that most all of his work contained. Some parts of the book reflect Griffin’s recent conversion to Christianity. Like Leather Nun I once owned the original comic book for Tales from the Tube and it was an awesome thing to hold in your hand once in while and flip through. I would like to be able to find a complete version of the comic book online as well as his illustrations for The Book of John project for Marantha! Music from 1970. Truly one of the greats from the period.

MORE TALES FROM THE TUBE BY RICK GRIFFIN HERE >>

INVISIBLE INVADERS

1959/Director: Edward L. Cahn/Writer: Samuel Newman

Cast: John Agar, Jean Byron, Philip Tonge, Robert Hutton, John Carradine, Hal Torey

I just am not really into blogging much lately for whatever reason. Not the end of the world if I blog regularly or not I suppose. But since I brought up the subject of the end of the world I can think of no better segue into this post’s film, Invisible Invaders. This is a film I think I saw when I was ten years old or so and have not seen it again until only recently. But it is film that has stuck in my mind all this time for it images of reanimated corpses that have many people have come to feel must have been some influence on later films like The Last Man on Earth and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. I would not go so far as to say Invisible Invaders is a zombie film in the sense that we today are familiar with zombie films but I would say it serves as a sort of bridge between old time zombie films more modern living dead features. The film resembles more in its concept of alien beings using re-animated corpses to attack and defeat the Earth from to none other than Ed Wood’s Plan Nine from Outer Space which came out later in the same year of 1959. The really early zombie films had zombies that were typically under some sort of ‘voodoo’ type spell and were controlled by some witch doctor or white man who has been in the jungle long enough to learn the rituals necessary to bring a dead man back to life and have said dead man do his bidding. Modern zombies, since Romero and his Italian imitators, are either the flesh eating living dead or humans infected with some virus that drives them into a homicidal frenzy. Invisible Invaders rests somewhere in the middle of these great epochs of the shuffling dead.

While the dead are not ravenous flesh eaters they are still driven to kill living human beings (though not only with their bare hands as we shall see). They are not controlled by a witch doctor but they are manipulated nonetheless by some type of intelligence outside their own instincts. And unlike the army of living dead in Ed Wood’s entertaining Plan 9 (an army of basically Vampira and Tor Johnson) Invisible Invaders features hordes of chalk faced corpses lumbering over hillsides (most of them wearing Wall Street suits) that created the images that haunted me as a little lad. Of course now I am much older and I watch a film like Invisible Invaders not to terrified but to be entertained with outrageously bad acting and dialog as well as gigantic plot holes, confusing stock footage and pretentious, unnecessary narration. Invisible Invaders is indeed a cheese classic by director Edward L. Cahn (It! The Terror from Beyond Space, The She Creature and another living dead classic Zombies of Mora Tau) but it is also a fairly well made low budget sc-fi film with great b/w photography by Maury Gertsman and for the most part a thoroughly enjoyable little sci-fi flick.

SEE MORE INVISBLE INVADERS RIGHT HERE >>

Tales from the Leather Nun, along with Dealer McDope, is the comic book effort the late Dave Sheridan is best remembered for. I picked up a copy way back in 1978 or so while working at a sort of counter culture shop in Lexington Ky, around the University area. I had stopped buying Marvel and DC comics and the Warren titles were losing steam. This was my William S. Burroughs and High Times magazine period in life and it only seemed natural to start buying underground comics. Of course I loved the stuff by Robert Crumb and I picked up Tales from the Leather Nun chiefly because it featured a short four page story by Crumb in it. Sheridan did the excellent cover and the first story. All the stories were well drawn and a little over the top really even for me at the time. But it was one of the treasures of my old comic book collection and I am happy to present a few sample pages. I picked up a copy in a batch download of underground titles and really did not expect to get something like this in the assortment of titles. The stories are irreverent but in that sort of satirical, almost inoffensive 70’s style. Hope you enjoy this glimpse into one really unique and perverted comic book.

MORE TALES FROM THE LEATHER NUN HERE >>

I can remember when the video rental movement began and how it existed even before places like Blockbuster came into existence. I was living in San Antonio Texas in the 80’s and little by little VHS tapes began showing up behind the counters at the little stops along the Texas back roads I trolled in my 76 Ford Maverick. At first I did not even have a VHS player and had to rent one from some shops. That proved to be a hassle and I bought a machine from Radio Shack and soon was renting all the weird movies I had only read about before in various film magazines and The Psychotronic Video Guide. By the time I moved to Seattle in late 1993 I was, between my VHS player and cable TV, a pretty regular movie watcher and I always wanted to see the more obscure things. I was not really aware that I liked strange movies until other people reacted negatively to my selections. For example I soon discovered that Eraserhead is a bad choice for a date flick. Who would have ever imagined that.

Of course I did find some movie watching mates along the way and by the time I came across Scarecrow Video in the once charming University District of Seattle I had gained a small foundation of knowledge of some film makers and their works that I wanted to seek out. Scarecrow was far more than a ma and pa video store though it started off as basically that by founders George and Rebeeca Latsios. It eventually became the largest video (and alter DVD) store on the west coast. But it had a warm environment and unbelievable selection of films. Many of the tapes were from George’s private collection and the store required a deposited from your bank card to rent them as they were so rare. I recall wanting to rent Alejandro Jodowsky’s The Holy Mountain and being a couple hundred short of the deposit and George over the dialog at the counter and told the clerk to let me check it out anyway. He had a passion for films and wanted people to see these films. The store also had an upstairs area that had a small theater. The last name I remember it as was The Sanctuary and I remember seeing Mario Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World on a nice 35mm print there among other cool films.

I lived across the lake in the Bellevue/Redmond area and it was not convenient for me to make the long drive to rent movies and try to return them in time but I did on occasion and the place helped to cement my dedication to offbeat films. They also had guests there, various filmmakers and stars. But truly great film people like Barbara Steele and Jack Hill. I had a signed VHS copy of Jack Hill’s Spider baby and had Kenneth Anger personally sign a copy of Hollywood Babylon with a quaint little “Do What Thou Wilt”. Sadly George developed brain cancer and struggled with it for a long time. He returned to his native Greece and passed away there. After that I did not go to the place as much. I was not friends with George but he knew me as a customer and always treated me so nice and offered great film suggestions.  Also as time went on the once idyllic U-District became less safe and nothing but a haven for druggies,  pushy panhandlers and various types punks. I still made some trips there occasionally and killed time just looking at the covers and reading books from the small library on the 2nd floor even if I did not rent anything. It became a small routine to stop there and then hit a few of the musical instrument stores or used record stores in the neighborhood. I would often stop at the small German deli next door and have a sandwich and soda. By the time things went to DVD I really did not go that often and I would not even upgrade to a DVD player until I came to China. I held longer than when it came to evolving from vinyl to CD. I spent a lot of time watching cheesy flicks in the end at my buddy Matt’s place or him sometimes at mine. But he had a DVD and his own place. I shared a house with 7 or 8 other people  of  questionable states of sanity and it was great to get away. They were probably ahppy to have me out too come to think of it. Scarecrow is a great place with nothing but good memories for me and if you’re ever in Seattle you simply cannot pass up the opportunity to just visit the the store and browse through it at least.