Lima

Poster tagline: TERRIFYING! FANTASTIC! STARTLING! SEE... A PREHISTORIC WORLD OF FANTASTIC ADVENTURE COME TO LIFE!!! There are few certainties in life, like the fact that one day you’ll die, that the smug douchebag Václav Klaus will continue to poison the local political climate, and that Bert I. Gordon does not change! His entire oeuvre, all his films, have a common symptom: overgrown, especially radioactively tuned-up fauna vs. man, hideous rear and front projections, sloppy effects; and this film is no exception. It’s an ultra low-budget piece shot in three days, and one of his worst, in fact. The story of four astronauts exploring the planet Nova (sic!!!), which suddenly appeared in our solar system, looks like this: during 45 minutes of the hour-long runtime, 4 actors sit in a spruce forest, with randomly cut shots of a fawn, a bear cub, an alligator (!), and a sloth (!), they are attacked by a hideous front projection of a giant ant, and one of the actors rolls in the ground fighting with a stuffed crocodile. The highlights are the violently cut shots of an iguana (that's supposed to be the dinosaur) breaking into some kind of opening that represents the cave where the main characters are hiding. All of this is achieved with hideous back projections. During the escape, the actors shoot a giant armadillo, there are brief shots of mammoths and prehistoric goats from the 1940 film One Million B.C., which do not match the visuals of the film at all, and everything ends with a shot of a massive atomic mushroom with one of the actors cheering. Forget the Ed Wood’s films, forget the legendary Robot Monster, this is an absolute cinematic low point that will have you laughing in disbelief.

Poster tagline: GREEN SLIME – INVADERS FROM BEYOND THE STARS – ARE HERE!!! Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima are history, now we are friends. This largely forgotten sci-fi classic is one of the first co-productions between Japan and the United States. It has a slight patina of Ishiro Honda's films – so the outdoor scenes, the barracks and the launching pad are made of papier-mâché, the interior design is very decent (everything was filmed in Japan), the effects are consistent with the time and typical of Toho studio; it all looks nice and the widescreen format suits it. The destruction of an asteroid threatening our planet using drills and an atomic bomb inspired Bay's Armageddon and Deep Impact, and the fight with aliens aboard a space orbital station has similarities with Scott's Alien. The monsters, elongated warty potatoes moving on two legs with one red eye and octopus-like tentacles, are cute today, they don't inspire much fear, but that didn’t affect my experience. Too bad the chase with the aliens around the orbital station stops after about half an hour and there are no twists to freshen things up. But I can't help but comment on the nonsense written by my colleagues and at the same time summarize my impressions. Folks, these films need to be seen through the eyes of the filmmaker and the viewer at the time and judged by the time they were made. There's nothing ridiculous about this solidly produced sci-fi flick, it's just that you're already a bit jaded by the Transformers and similar attractions :o)

There’s no more boring and hackneyed cliché in recent times than the constant emphasis on how much better Ben Affleck is as a director than as an actor.

Poster tagline: WATCH OUT!!! GAMMA RAY CREATURES OUT OF CONTROL!!! Weird film, weird (almost) sci-fi. The theme, a man (two in this case) in a mysterious unknown country with totalitarian elements, reminded me a little bit of Juráček's Case for a Rookie Hangman, only without the strong absurd elements. The plot, set in a small, remote country called Gudavia, clearly brushes against totalitarian systems (one of the main characters, a boy genius, wears a uniform like a small NSDAP member, complete with the requisite slick blonde Nazi patois), and the ruler uses gamma rays to turn people into either gifted geniuses or, conversely, brainwashed obedient puppets willing to follow any order (responding to the sound of a whistle) and terrorize the local population, while the small, gifted children create art not unlike socialist realism, etc. It's not brilliant, but it's not a stupid film either. There's nothing unintentionally ridiculous about it, and it meanders through quite unpredictable plot twists, which is nice. The British approach is also refreshing, the main character protecting the female protagonist is not a sexually attractive man, but a bland and slightly overweight middle-aged geezer (in Hollywood it would have to be an Adonis).

Poster tagline: WARNING! BEWARE THEIR STARE! THE MANAGEMENT WILL SUPPLY YOU FREE WITH SPACE SHIELD EYE PROTECTORS TO PREVENT YOUR ABDUCTION INTO OUTER SPACE!!! Granted, it would be good stuff to screen at a party, while taking some stimulants, but I don't believe that even then the audience will still be enjoying it after an hour. Even considering the year it was made, when the naivety of the 1950s was already leaving cinema screens for good, this is an extremely bad film. A spaceship carrying bald aliens with elfin pointy ears, led by a woman who looks like Nefertiti lands somewhere off the coast of Long Island to "harvest" Earth women because all the women on their planet have died off, and the aliens need to reproduce. Into this mix comes a downed human pilot who has a machine for a brain and about whom his creator, a professor, fears that a negative experience could turn him into a Frankenstein monster with a desire to kill. So for the whole film, "Frankenstein" staggers around for several kilometres, killing someone here and there, while the aliens abduct women, who are cast in the role of passive cowards, incapable of resisting. Since we are in the 1960s and the sexual revolution is in its embryonic stages, there must be a swimsuit promenade (for one of the captives), an occasional rock 'n' roll banger, and one scene that alternates between night and day, depending on where the camera is – the director doesn't care. Then there are the haphazard proportions of the inside of the rocket and the view from the outside, and I haven't even mentioned the "monster" (a guy with a skull on his head and a gorilla skin) locked in the rocket and used against rebellious captives. Because the director's inability to sustain the material for 80 minutes is considerable, a good third of the runtime is filled with uninteresting cut-up period footage depicting military equipment, and everything is presented so blandly and uninterestingly that the guilty pleasure potential is completely unfulfilled.

Poster tagline: CRAWLING, SLIMY THINGS TERROR-BENT ON DESTROYING THE WORLD!!! Everything is bad. The filmmakers took Heinlein's novel “The Puppet Master”, deboned it and screwed-up whatever was left. The director didn't even bother with anything that could have visually refreshed all that babble. The whole film revolves around the fact that remote-controlled alien humans attach these black, slimy worms to the necks of Earthlings to bring their victims under their mental control, but even when the actors are explicitly looking at them, with amazement in their eyes, the viewer doesn't see the attached creatures because there was no budget for that. Visually, the film is quite repulsive, the camera sometimes chooses impossible angles (someone must have been playing Orson Welles), the whole set consists of one rocket, surrounded by scaffolding and several half-empty rooms, and the cherry on top are the completely unknown and unlikeable actors, who overact with gusto. Inside the spaceship, with the floating vapour, the white-bearded Methuselah and the crawling lumps with antennae, only the toughest can survive. One star for the only memorable scene, when the camera follows the gaze of a worm crawling on its victim and the viewer seems to see the surroundings through its eyes.

Poster tagline: ONE DAY AFTER A MILLION YEARS IT COME OF OUT HIDING TO... KILL, KILL, KILL!!! I'm astonished. A catchy title, and enticing advertising campaign and posters, but the monster itself plays only second or third fiddle. I really don’t like it when filmmakers make fools out of viewers. That said, in terms of filmmaking, there is nothing much to complain about. Despite the genre classification, this is no cheap B-movie at first glance – expensive, lavish sets with stacked herds of buffalo, multiple extras and impressive Mexican realism, all shot in widescreen cinemascope, only the monster has wandered off somewhere. In the 80-minute runtime, it appears for the first time after a full hour, and until then it’s not even mentioned in the slightest. On the contrary, they deal over and over again with a love triangle, the main character's problems with finding a herd of cattle, all with rustling eavesdropped dialogues. Granted, the last twenty minutes, when the stop-motion animated dinosaur doesn't leave the screen, improves the impression with its appealing action concept, but overall it's not a hit. If you want to experience a really impressive unusual crossover of prehistoric fauna vs. dirty Mexicans, choose The Valley of Gwangi, still alive thanks to Harryhausen's effects, while this film by Rodríguez is deservedly gathering dust.

Poster tagline: THE FANTASTIC NIGHT OF TERROR THAT MENACED THE FATE OF THE WORLD! SIGHTS TOO WEIRD TO IMAGINE! DESTRUCTION TOO MONSTROUS TO ESCAPE!!! This film, more than any other, confirms the rule that the more enticing and exalted the posters, the dumber the film. The premise, a Martian woman and her deadly robot terrorize a small hotel somewhere in the Scottish Highlands in order to capture the male race that has become extinct on Mars, is straight out of Ed Wood's pen, but the potential for guilty pleasure entertainment is considerable, so I wouldn't be as harsh in my assessment as my colleagues here. There is, for example, the scene when they introduce the powers of the robot, which evaporates a tree, a tractor and a barn with laser beams, or the hypnosis scene, and, in fact, all the moments when the actress in the role of the martian with a serious face recites her threats. The way the film takes itself terribly seriously, the way the actors passionately deliver their lines, the deadly serious themes that are dealt with (the desire for family, the fear for one's fellow man, the willingness to sacrifice oneself for the good of the whole), all against the backdrop of the "threat" of a woman in a leather coat and a robot, who moves slowly like a snail and looks like a refrigerator with a light bulb for a head; all this, and the idea that people really experienced it in the cinema 60 years ago, takes on a kind of Dadaist dimension. And that’s exactly what I enjoy in films like this. Moreover, visually it was quite cute, the model of the flying saucer was adorable, its landing was pretty good and the overall theatrical stylisation (one house, a couple of trees around and a glowing spaceship) didn't bother me, on the contrary, I quite enjoyed it. So I give it a merciful 3*, even though I may end up roasting in "critics hell" :o)

Poster tagline: HE COMES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE! A DEAD MAN STALKS HIS PREY! SO TERRIFYING ONLY SCREAMS CAN DESCRIBE IT! HORROR THAT CAN HAPPEN NOW... TO YOU! Taken through the lens of a viewer of the time, it must be said that this horror B-movie, so popular overseas, still deserves its reputation today. At the time it was released, censor and audience circles were concerned about the increasing violence shown in cinemas, and this particular film was held up as a deterrent, something that famed producer Sam Katzman was not too worried about. The killings (I counted seven in total) are captured subtly for our time, rather hinted at or through shadows. Strangulation, double stabbing, killing with a strong fist blow, breaking a spine (accompanied by a nice naturalistic crunch), all this won't scare a hardened viewer today, but in its time it must have caused a stir. The outline of the plot is properly pulp – a gangster, with the help of a German doctor, kidnaps people and replaces half of their brain with a device that allows him to control the person remotely like a puppet to carry out his "mission": killing inconvenient people. It's guilty pleasure especially in the last third, when the plot escalates, and for me personally it's always a joy to see my favourite charismatic, sci-fi and horror B-movie star of the time, Richard Denning. The execution is quite inventive and imaginative in places; in short, I have nothing to complain about here :o)

Poster tagline: HIS SECRET POWER MENACED THE WORLD!!! I watched the coloured version. The potential for fun is there, after all, the synopsis isn't entirely bad: a rocket crashes in Santa Monica with an alien who becomes invisible when he takes off his spacesuit and is only able to communicate through a Morse code. The problem is that it's all so stupidly executed. The beginning is interspersed with one quick shot after another, with the actors communicating coordinates in rapid succession, five, ten, twenty times, and by the time it's about ten minutes in, you start banging your head against the screen in despair. Then there’s twenty minutes of silly dialogue planning what to do next, and when the chase on the construction site comes up, the obvious symptom is revealed in all its glory: they are running all the time! Like Forrest Gump, from one place to another: a construction site, an observatory; it actually doesn’t matter where. They run not only in the laboratory, where the viewer is also treated to a few special effect sequences with the alien helmet floating in the air with the help of a front projection, or a key being pulled out of a lock, otherwise all the effects – the interaction of the undressed alien with the environment – are reduced to something invisible opening a door, moving a chair or a curtain, turning a doorknob, and, watch out, carrying a woman in the air, which is the only really good shot where the production team overdid themselves. The actors are acting, or rather running, kind of bored and the only one who’s really enjoying it is the dog constantly wagging its tail happily, I guess the director promised it a bone :o)