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!



    Radioactive Dreams

    This was a very '80s post-nuclear-war film. In the opening sequence, we see some criminals heading for this underground hideout. The bombs start droppin', and they grab 2 kids who were nearby and run below ground. The kids grow up down there, on a steady diet of canned food and detective novels, and come out 20ish years later as '50s private-eye type people. There isn't a great deal of plot, although kissing and innuendo seem to play a big factor in post-A-bomb life. Additionally, there are these key-things which activate the last nuclear missile left, and these fall into the two detectives (or "dicks", using their vernacular; you can bet that causes some silly misunderstandings with more 'modern' groups!) laps. They wander about, bump into mutants, 8-year-old elvis-impersonating and exceedingly foul-mouthed kids, cannibalistic hippies, bounty-hunting greasers and all the other colorful people who have somehow survived a decade or two of nuclear winter, all of which want to kill them for the keys. On the positive side, there is a lot of (to my inexperienced ear) well-done lingo/vernaculars, juxtaposing cutely ('50s detective dialogue interacting with flower-child/hippiedom, etc). My biggest complaint, aside from the lack of plot, is that about 70% of the movie has '80s rock music in the background (not terribly good rock music, either, as one might guess): another casualty of the confusion of that decade, whether to make films or music videos...
    REDEEMING FEATURES:
  • A pseudo-Mad-Max-esque scene, where their car is chased by florescent red wigged motorcyclists
  • A REALLY freaky guy, who looks kind of like an ugly, unkempt, un-made-up Kiss band member, who leads of the Hippie Cannibals.
  • Giant Chinese-dragon-dog-esque creatures that live in the sewers!
  • Black hooded guys with voice-distorters and grenade launchers. They're pretty hep, even if they Do deal with the elvis-punks.

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    FROGS!

    Ok, let me first say that the titular frogs of this film do very little except jump around ominously on camera for inordinate amounts of time. This film is about a nature-lovin' fellow in a canoe with a camera. Beefy man and pantless-swimsuit girl, members of the Crocket (kil't him a frog when he was only three..) family (the local rich guy) speed recklessly by in a speedboat & spill natureboy into the drink. Beefy man apologizes, and au natural goes back with them to their big white mansion full of big white people and some black servants, ostensibly to dry off & share in the festive (100th? something like that) birthday celebrations of Colonel Sander's rich older brother, who is in a wheelchair.
    Then people start getting killed by animals. Not frogs, mind you; the frogs are too busy hopping around on camera to kill people. Oh, actually this is sort of set up by people saying "Gee, we hate all those animals, let's kill more of them with pesticides," while old patriarch-Sanders guy says something to the effect of "how loathsome is my family, and their nature-destroying ways...sure would serve us right if a whole mess of frogs killed everyone!" Natural Geographic Guy has already showered & dried off (?) and been hit on by most people in the house. One of the housekeepers was going to spray pesticides on some animals, and is now missing.
    You know where it's going from here (well, you know where it was going from the title, but i digress). It's not that the animals are smart, its that the people are dumb as posts (see below). What it seems the movie is all about is "animals kill people, then we get a shot of said animals crawling around on the people's faces." Since they only start fighting back at the very end (& it's Wild America Man who does the shootin'), it isn't even that much of a thrilling Man-Against-Angry-Nature tragic story; more of a Man-shoots-himself-in-leg,-spiders-bite-man-to-death tale of pathos.
    REDEEMING FEATURES:
  • The guy in the greenhouse, who gets killed by reptiles that knock jars of dangerous chemicals off the shelf, and he wanders into the chemical clouds on purpose (perhaps to pick up the dangerous gasses & put them back in the jars??) & keels over.
  • The fact that they have animals from all over the world supposedly on this little southern wetland (perhaps due to the fact the film was shot in a nature preserve, not a natural wetland)
  • The movie review book that described this movie as "Man kills frogs...so frogs kill his family!", that made us look all over for this flick.
  • WHATEVER YOU DO, watch to the end of the credits. It vindicates the title and is the reason this movie gets 3 stars rather than probably 1 or 2.

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    Son of the Blob

    The silly sequel to the classic tale of man vs. strawberry preserves. This is a cameo-fest of the mid-70s, starring such people i'm to young to have known & loved, such as Robert Walker, Godfrey Cambridge, Carol Lynley, Shelley Berman, Larry Hagman, etc. At least those are the people they list on the back of the box. The blob was brought back in a thermos by a workman that was digging up in the north pole or wherever the original blob was kept in cold-freeze. The lid is left off, & it eats his kitten and his girlfriend while he's drinking beer in front of the tube. In a striking commentary on couch-potato-hood, he's eaten by his own blob-filled chair after getting up to mess with the antenna.
    The plot(?) focuses on some hippies/young kids, the suave male one of whom is having a birthday party. There's a lot of tension between them and "the fuzz" when they attempt to recruit help after one of them sees people being eaten. Moreover, there's a rich guy whose property keeps getting damaged by the rampagin' kids as they dash around trying to warn people, and his struggle to achieve justice in a blob-upset world is the second slice of bread in the sandwich of "Oh the Humanity!" that is this movie.
    Um, yeah, that sounded good; did i mention i     graduated recently? I should never have to write sentences like the previous one ever again. In that spirit, let me mention that the blob also attacks in a bowling alley in this one. This movie is for those who thought all that cooperation between the Crazy Kids & adults in the original blob was a little too convenient. Fast-forward through the sequence where the other hippie and his girlfriend get stoned in a storm drain or something.
    REDEEMING FEATURES:
  • They go to a traditional '70s college student party, and there's a guy dressed in a gorilla costume! This was evidently the norm back then, but it's a treat for those of us who didn't live through that heady era of simian impersonation!
  • The "hair sculpt" scene: a hippie goes in for a hair cut, & the barber (evidently a cameoing comedian) says he doesn't cut hair, he sculpts it; the hippie agrees to a $400 hair-sculpt. Mercifully they are both eaten by the blob moments later.
  • That scene where the guy is zippin' along in his dune buggy, with his best girl and the body of his monkey-costume on (he's removed the mask, to avoid being mistaken for Grape-Ape pulling a grand theft auto on Speedbuggy).
  • The sensitive interplay between the protagonist-hippie and his hysterical girlfriend: He: "Oh, it was all a trick to get me to this surprise birthday party!" She: (runs off & locks herself in the bathroom)
  • The fact they found an excuse for the rich guy to insist the bowling alley must not be evacuated, and for the bowling alley to be connected to an ice skating rink.
  • The last scene: the sheriff gives a big dramatic speech on TV, while standing on the ice rink full of frozen blob; a little trickle of blob unfreezes under the heat of the TV lights, and piles up around his boot. Near the end of his speech, he looks down & is half-way into saying "What?" when they freeze-frame & roll credits. He looks like a cretin. Worth the price of admission.

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    The Wizard of Mars

    This is a...well, let me tell it to you how the movie box first told it to me: Three EARTHMEN and a GIRL encounter the horrors of MARS! From this auspicious start, the movie just takes off. A 1964 rocket-space-adventure, we have the classic cast: Heroic Leader-Guy, 18-year-old young Buffoon character, The GIRL (Leader-Guy's love interest for no reason other than the utter lack of competition), and "Doc," presumably so-called for his scientific knowledge. They've made the gutsy choice to have Doc be played by a portly, mustached gentleman, who evidently received his scientific degree at night school while working as a plumber. They're the first ever mission to Mars, for scientific purposes; as they approach the red planet (smack-dab on the new year of 1974 if I recall), they encounter some sort of magnetic barrier. Despite Doc and the GIRL looking into periscopes, the ship starts to plummet towards the inhospitable sphere. As they go down, buffoon-guy exclaims a tormented "Everyone else just goes to the moon, but no, WE had to go to MARS!" That just jams the human element into it for me.
    Having crash-landed on Mars, they suit up, grab some air & a rifle, and head out. For an unexplained reason, if they can find the rocket's main stage, which they ejected as they were going down, they're safe. Perhaps it has to do with the lack of radio power they had on their original craft, i was never terribly clear on this point. They proceed to march around some swampy prairie land for a while, until they decide to raft the rest of the way. This leads to some exciting scenes where they sit inside the rafts in front of stationary background & talk about currents and things. The disbelief was willing, but the suspension was weak.
    Inside a cave, they abandon their rafts & pretend to be walking across thin ledges over lava. Doc really blows this effect by bumbling along like a troglodyte, clearly exposing the ledge-foreshortening visual effect the rest of the cast & cameraman tried so hard to create. Some more stuff happens, including a bad splice from one scene to another so it sounds like one crew-member yells "HADDOCK!" (but we probably are just getting the second half of "I've Had It!"), and buffoon-kid falls down a sand dune on camera (after the cave is the desert, as anyone whose studied Martian geography would know).
    They eventually get to this City, by following the yellow brick road (i kid you not). There they find some genuinely creepy looking Martians in tubes, and the floating head of John Carradine. It teaches them a lesson about ultimate technology & Faust-like species (a la Forbidden Planet), and they have to start a watch up again. After that there's an exciting twist-ending, but i don't want to give it all away.
    REDEEMING FEATURES:
  • They let the buffoon-kid carry the gun. Fools.
  • The voice-overs where Leader-Guy speculates about being watched by an intelligence. Feel flattered! He's talking about You!
  • Those scenes where they pretend to be floatin' along, when they're clearing staying in front of the same cave set!
  • John Carradine just makes this film. All the other actors seem like the lightweights they are when playing against his disembodied head.

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    Half Human

    This is another movie that proves an adage that was better-hidden in the original Godzilla: Japanese Monster Movie plus American narrator (to avoid having to dub/include many of the scenes) does not a movie make. Here they went the whole 9 yards & didn't dub ANY of the Japanese casts' dialogue; they didn't even include the audio track except in a few occasions (notably, gunshots & screams--the international language: violence between monsters 'n' people).
    This relegates the audience to listening to the story, as narrated by John Carradine. He is a college professor with an incredibly slim head who is explaining something funny that happened in Japan a few years ago to two heavy-smoking fellow professors. Most of the time their narrative is so captivating, we are allowed to watch the voiced-over original movie. Sometimes (between thick, satisfying drags on their 1950s cigarettes) the other professors ask him questions, and then we're pulled away from the movie into Mr. Carradine's office, where we get to see all three professors sit around awkwardly, scratch their faces and pull their ears while narrating.
    We also see the corpse of the little big-foot (the big-foots, or Abominable Snowmen the potentially half-human creatures that the Japanese movie is about) in the science lab (the other set that Mr. Carradine & his fellow faculty members are allowed to enter). The college janitor (evidently), always one for a challenge, has preformed an autopsy on the creature, and says some medically improbable things (it is half human; not half-way evolved to human, but 1 half of its skull is human-y, the other beast-like). Yep. Thanks for stopping by, folks, & drive safe on the way home.
    REDEEMING FEATURES:

  • The next film directed by the guy who directed the original Godzilla. Some time i'd like to see a subtitle version of the Japanese film, because it is probably a lot better than this version.
  • Decent monster costume (big face)
  • John Carradine's head is very thin.

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