Lima

Poster tagline: MASTODONS! DINOSAURS! FLYING REPTILES! BATTLE FOR SURVIVAL – AGAINST BRUTAL, BESTIAL NEANDERTHALS! Pure, playful entertainment, something like a Zeman flick of its time. The premise is simple: after a comet collides with Earth, two rivals in love reach its surface of the comet, where prehistoric life thrives. The creators mixed all sorts of things: mammoths, dinosaurs, Neanderthals, Stone Age hunters, aggressive underground creatures with white wigs, etc. Thanks to the colourful production design and a very action-packed story, the film never gets boring. In the studio scenes, which make up 95% of the runtime, there's no direct interaction between the actors and the animals; the classic rear projection comes to the rescue, with an overgrown coati and its fight with a snake, a giant newt and an iguana, a dinosaur duel that is highly reminiscent of the one from Robot Monster and cut from the earlier 1940 film One Million B.C. There are also elephants with glued-on fur, one of which chases one of the actors across the desert, and a fight with a giant spider that gives Ed Wood’s octopus a run for its money. While the Neanderthals are really rough, thanks to the good make-up effects, the prehistoric women look like supermodels, with neat hairstyles, long manes and make-up. The open ending called for a sequel that never materialised.

Incredibly sweet, playful, a delight for the eye, the ear and the spirit of all old people, among whom I also count myself. The dance number at the end was so terribly cute that I was grinning from ear to ear. And if I were a woman, I'd kill for Jean Dujardin's irresistible smile. Since I'm a man, at least my platonic love for Berenice Bejo will have to suffice :o)

Quite a pleasant flick, I can’t say a bad word about it. Admittedly, the stop-motion animation of the lizards isn't of a very high standard (and can't compare to Harryhausen's), but the widescreen cinemascope format and bright colours favour the visuals, and the storyline isn't completely rubbish either, though of course it doesn't avoid a number of genre clichés. The humorous side is taken care of by an re-animated proto-human, confronted with the achievements of modern times (fridge, mirror, stove), the eye is delighted by nice locations, a duel of a predatory dinosaur with a brontosaurus or an excavator. Perhaps only the overuse of not very good rear projection can be reproached, and the interior jungle environment with artificial flora also occasionally lacks realism. Judging by the title and the year, I was expecting a cheap B-movie and what I got was an almost high-budget show that can be recommended with a clear conscience.

Poster tagline: WE WILL NOT PERMIT YOU TO SEE THESE SHOCKERS UNLESS YOU ARE TO RELEASE THIS THEATRE OF ALL RESPONSIBILITY FOR DEATH BY FRIGHT!!! The creators' somewhat exaggerated promise that this is the first pure horror musical is fulfilled only by the first half. It will be most enjoyed by viewers who love the frequent sight of girls in bikinis and oldie music in the style of the Beach Boys. The rest of the film is filled with frequent attacks by funny monsters (a kind of vague cross between chicken and fish), especially in the dark, when the most frequent victims are exclusively women, and there are such treats as a mass attack on a girls' dormitory, etc. But all in all, aside from dumb dialogue like: “Do you believe that kissing is unhealthy?” - “I don't know. I've never been...” - “You've never been kissed?” - “No, I've never been sick,” I was expecting something much worse. It can’t have been cheap. Everything was shot on location, the music is good and the frequent appearance of the monsters show prevented this entertaining B-movie to be awful.

Poster tagline: MEET THE KING OF THE CRUEL LIZARDS IN A DEADLY DUEL!!! An ultra-low-budget variation on the then popular Lost World genre (a group of people, mostly scientists, in an isolated unexplored area full of prehistoric fauna), interesting perhaps only because it was filmed in Technicolor and the lizards – i.e. actors dressed in crappy costumes – shuffle from side to side like drunkards after a binge. The first half hour in a pub and on the deck of a ship is quite uninteresting, the island itself was shot entirely in a studio, where the landscape is replaced by 3 shots – a campground (where about 2 thirds of the time is spent), a place "somewhere in the jungle", which the actors walk through about five times, and an artificial beach. The dodgy effects were amusing, I'd never seen such bad rear projections in a Bert I. Gordon film, and not once do the actors come into direct interaction with the lizards, or perhaps a joint shot (the only exception is the first "attack" where a sailor is lying in front of the rear projection, where 2 lizards bump into each other standing up, which is supposed to look like they are attacking the sailor).

“If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams and I don't want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life, with this project.“ A riveting look at the making of one of the most challenging films in the history of cinema, Fitzcarraldo, directed by one of the most skilful filmmakers who never compromised artistically or creatively, Werner Herzog. The idea of carrying a 60-ton steamboat over a mountain ridge with a 40% gradient, in the middle of the Peruvian jungle, 2000 miles from the nearest civilization, was a real challenge that Herzog fought doggedly for 4 years, despite the risk of human casualties. Herzog might come out as an intransigent fanatic, but his witty philosophical monologues towards the end of the film make it clear that this eminent filmmaker had and has his head screwed on straight, whatever you think of him and his work.

Poster tagline: EVERY MAN ITS PRISONER! EVERY WOMAN ITS SLAVE!!! If we are to believe the words of Roger Corman himself, this film was supposed to be a veiled warning against totalitarianism. But the central dramatic line, which slips into self-parody throughout, is grossly mishandled by the director, and the central monster itself also undermines the intended seriousness. The monster that "conquered the world" looks like an overgrown carrot with pointy teeth and crab-like tentacles that move clumsily up and down like a teddy bear. It has no legs, so it moves like it's riding on hidden wheels, it lives in a cave and spits out little bats that bite into the back of its victims' necks, putting them under its mental control. That sounds fun, but the attacks in question are three in total, and the monster itself only appears for a few seconds in the last ten minutes. In the meantime, the viewer has to endure dull dialogue, a pointless romantic plot and "dramatic" acting by all involved, with star Lee Van Cleef, in particular, probably not putting this job in his resume. But I admit that the showdown with the monster would be a hit on youtube :o)

Poster tagline: IT WILL SCARE THE LIVING HELL OUT OF YOU!! SEE THE GHASTLY GHOULS IN FLAMING COLOR!!! Well, alas. The poster and the advertising promised a lot, but the entertainment was scarce. And yet the script is not completely futile (of course, by the B-movie standards of the time). Basically, the point is that chief makeup artist and creator of monster masks Pete Drummond (werewolves are his main specialty) gets fired by the new heads of the American International film studio, on the grounds that his work is no longer needed because the public demands comedy and humor, so the studio will focus only on musicals. Drummond is not willing to accept this and with the help of a special ointment he temporarily subdues (one might say "hypnotises") two young aspiring actors who, disguised as a werewolf (a very nice mask, by the way) and the Frankenstein monster, do his will and murder the studio executives. The premise is decent, but even three murders can't banish the static boredom that completely lacks even a guilty-pleasure element. Perhaps the only thing worth mentioning is the fact that it has a regular musical singing number and also that the last 10 minutes were filmed in colour. But the reason why they wasted Technicolor escapes me a bit (aside from the red flames of the final fire).

Poster tagline: WHAT PRIMITIVE PASSIONS… WHAT MAD DESIRES DROVE HIM ON? HE HELD THEM ALL IN THE GRIP OF DEADLY TERROR… NOTHING COULD KEEP HIM FROM THIS WOMAN HE CLAIMED AS HIS OWN!!! A kind of B-movie variation on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The "doctor" here is Professor Groves, who tries to prove to the scientific community, with general ridicule, that the ancient Neanderthals had a more developed brain than the present-day homo sapiens-sapiens, while Mr Hyde is his alter ego – a primitive Neanderthal in trousers, white shirt and a funny mask – into which he transformed after the injection of a special serum. The real fun starts after the middle, when the hairy Groves runs through the mountains, knocks out three men and a dog, kidnaps a screaming woman and finally fights a sabre-toothed tiger (his former cat, which he also transformed by injection). Location shots of the Sierra make up about five percent of the film, with the rest wandering around cheap sets with fake trees and the professor's house. Groves's prehistoric mask is not very good, and the illusion of a sabre-toothed tiger is created by shots of an ordinary tiger, probably borrowed from the circus, combined with about five close-up shots of a head mask with artificial incisors, and the two views don't fit together at all.

Poster tagline: TEST TUBE TERROR-BEAST AMOK ON COLLEGE CAMPUS! CO-ED BEAUTY CAPTIVE O A MAN MONSTER! STUDENTS VICTIM OF TERROR-BEAST!!! Neither silly enough to be fun, nor good enough to watch again. In any case, unworthy of the name of Jack Arnold, probably the best filmmaker of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. An average director of his time could have made this and the result would have been the same. The whole thing revolves around the last surviving prehistoric fish that Prof. Blake had brought to his lab. He gets infected from it three times (a cut, a splash of the fish blood from a pipe, and an experiment with an injection directly into a vein) and each time he turns into – well – a Neanderthal!! In the first transformation he kills his friend, in the second he kills the detective who’s after him, and in the last he runs like a Stone Age man across the countryside, with a torn plaid shirt and an axe in his hand, making menacing grunting noises, which is quite at odds with the rest of the film, where he philosophically ponders the narrow line between being human and being an animal. The make up effects deserve praise – neat prosthetics with hair – it’s a pity that the four minutes or so that we get to see it are not enough to fully enjoy it.