th' mighty Lefty Seal of Approval! Lefty's B-Movie Reviews

Ranked from Zero through Ten stars...
Zero = Not even 'So-bad-it's funny'
Five = Unintentionally hilarious
Ten = You could watch it like it was REAL MOVIE!

Movies I've Reviewed:
Teenagers from
Outer Space		 The Deadly Mantis Killers from Space Night of the
Lepus		 Carnival of
Souls
The Indestructible
Man		 Warlords of the
21st Century		 Crash of the
Moons		 Journey to the
Center of Time		 Reptilicus
Giant Gila
Monster		 Day of the
Triffids		 Valley of
the Gwangi		 Kronos IT! the Terror
from Beyond Space
Radioactive
Dreams		 FROGS! Son of
the Blob		 The Wizard
of Mars		 Half
Human
Eegah Tarantula The Unearthly Killer Bats King of
Kong Island
Devil Girl
from Mars		 YOR; The Hunter
from the Future

Other Features:

  • Wanna-B   Movies that LOOK like they might be B or entertaining...but aren't. DON'T BE FOOLED, read the list!




    Giant Gila Monster

    Well, this is a VERY early B science fiction film, about a pituitary-case gila monster, that wanders around the scrub-lands somewhere in a rural-desert type place. Its rating may be artificially inflated because it stars the most true-blue all-american archetypical good guy hero you're ever likely to meet in any film. He works on his hotrod, yet encourages his friends not to drag-race or engage in any dangerous activity, spends his last pennies to buy leg-braces for his little mysteriously-injured sister, sings real good, looks out for the kids & gives people tow-jobs free of charge (he works at a body shop). He also keeps close ties with the Sheriff, the self-professed "Only lawman in a 10,000 mile area" or something like that. Man, that place is both rural & a thief's paradice...Well, I can't talk any more about this prince amongst teens without vomitting, so on with the film. This is one of those films that enjoys making the people real dumb, so they don't notice the monster until very near the end. That's when they drive a car full of explosives into it, BOOM! Well, that didn't take very long, next film...seriously, this is a very early film--lotsa stark sets, lots of characters that We, in the modern age, would think are a bit cardboard, etc.
    REDEEMING FEATURES:
  • French foreign-exchange girl, to add an accent other than 'yokel' to the flim
  • Lovable elderly car-nut, who shows impressionable children that drunk driving and racing trains is humorous; though if it makes you sing like him, it could be seen as anti-drug propaganda
  • Drunk DJ who calls everyone "Dad"...
  • Requisite crotchety-old-rich-guy, who makes life hell for everyone.

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    Day of the Triffids

    This could be retitled "When Plants Attack," I guess. That's what happens. The triffids are ugly-headed, 3-tentacled, 3-legged shambling green things, that attack everyone. Of course, it doesn't help that a bunch of meteors have burned up in the atmosphere the other day & now everyone who saw them is blinded. The story focuses on some people who can still see: two of them (a marine & a little girl) wander around Europe, while a once-great marine biologist falls off the wagon in the presence of his wife, on a secluded island. I think he says it best, when he uttered the soulful cry "There's no sense in being killed by a plant!" It is interesting to see a film where society is fallin' down around everyone's ears, & they just have to keep on goin'. Not as grim as it could be, 'cuz they find a humorous truck that plays music, & it has an optimistic ending, as long as you don't mind that most of the world's population has been weeded out, so to speak (har).
    REDEEMING FEATURES:
  • Uh, I guess the sequence where criminals with guns make a house full of blind people dance with them, & then they're all killed by triffids, that's something
  • The nutty revelation of the 'silver bullet' that actually kills the triffids
  • The calm & efficient emergency broadcasting systems
  • When one of the triffids gets its head whacked off by a harpoony-thing that the couple on the island have!
  • The obligatory "creature gets the night watchman" sequence!

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    Valley of the Gwangi  (no picture available)

    Wow...this is the only cowboys/dinosaur crossover film that I've ever seen. It's about a hidden valley where there are tiny horses & giant dinosaurs. It's been a while since I've seen this one, but there's lots of fun dinosaur attacks & lassoing sequences, & its worth it for the bizarreness. Good desert sequences, standard characters from both a tough-guy cowboy film & a sci-fi movie, & a giant T-rex running loose in a Mexican town.
    REDEEMING FEATURES:
  • The end, where the T-rex crashes around in a burning down Cathedral. That must be symbolic of something, I imagine
  • A pterodactyl attacks them when they're in the valley, & they bring it down & snap its neck
  • Tiny horses!

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    Kronos  (no picture available)

    Well, here a giant robot comes down from space & stomps across Mexico. It has 3 legs with which to stomp on people, & a whole group of earth people to try to figure out how to stop it. It actually looks like an air traffic control tower. This movie asks, what I think, is one of the most important question in B science and marriage, to this day (see below). Additionally, I think we see fighter planes actually able to do something against a giant creature in the end; this is refreshing, after years of Godzilla films undermining our faith in air superiority...
    REDEEMING FEATURES:
  • (dialogue from scientist to secretary/love interest*) "Could you actually marry the man who pulled the big scientific boner of all time?"
  • Happy ending where they run off into an ocean in their antiquated bathing suits.

    * = an actual job description in the '50s, I've gathered from these films

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    IT! the Terror from Beyond Space

    An earnest monster film, set in the glittering future 1973. In all deference to this film, it did make chillingly accurate predictions about the near-future state of Weapons technology (their space ship crews are still armed with WW II-esque handguns, rifles and grenades). The other assumption (man's first manned mission to Mars, and man's second manned mission to Mars to see what happened to the first...) was a little over-ambitious. None the less, this is a pretty decent film for 1958--though a lot of it seems genre-standard, these were the films that established them standards. They do have some pretty good "do we leave Bob in with the monster, or risk the rest of our lives by trying to rescue him?" sorta dilemmas (that are at least mentioned rather than skimmed over), and a pretty good Indestructible Monster sorta beast. All that thoughtful analysis doesn't change the fact that there's always B fun to be had in any black-&-white film that contains both a (presumably) green monster and a bazooka!
    REDEEMING FEATURES:
  • The precursor to that scene in ALIEN where the crew is sitting around another crappy space-meal & talking about what they're going to do when they get back to Earth.
  • Space-walkin' fun!
  • See if you can guess which crew member gets killed first!
  • A couple of bone-head "let's open the hatch & see if he's still right below the hatch" sequences, but mostly they're pretty smart about it...
  • My copy of the box contains the phrase "IN GLORIOUS BLACK & WHITE"
  • Ok, the scientist makes a statement like 'Mars must have had an intelligent civilization, that eventually reverted to Barbarism.' It also could just be that Mars evolved some particularly smart monsters, and they never had any big intelligent civilization!
  • Ends with the memorable and oft'-repeated line "Another name for Mars is DEATH!"

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