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!



    Eegah

    Starring Richard Kiel ("Jaws" in that James Bond movie, the box informs us in short-hand) and some other people. The movie starts with swingin' heroine of the movie driving to a swingin' night at the club with her father and her Pop-Eye-faced boyfriend. She stops along the way and sees a really tall guy with a big beard. It turns out to be a caveman out walking his goat. The next day her erstwhile father is helicoptered into the desert to hike around where she saw the large gentleman. We see the girl and Pop-Eye at a hep pool party, and this is where we first find out about Pop-Eye's superhuman musical powers: when he starts strumming his guitar and singing a tune, a group of invisible female backup vocalists can be heard, even when he's out in the middle of the desert! This is so exciting, you barely notice the minutes ooze by as he and his girlfriend dunebuggy around the desert looking for her father. She manages to get kidnapped by Eegah (the caveman), while scenes of Pop-Eye running around the desert with his gun are interspliced with scenes of menacing looking animals (rattlesnakes, wolves) who never leave their footage and thus are incapable of hurting him.
    Ok, now we get to the really painful part of the film: the girl & her father trapped in Eegah's cave, as Eegah woos the girl. They try to keep him distracted, and eventually they get him to move the giant rock blocking the door (because he & the girl couldn't go at it when her father was watching, & she suggests going outside rather than Eegah killing her father). When they get outside, the sailor-man shows up with his gun, & they tussle. Eegah shows amazing cleverness as he disarms Pop-Eye, & then breaks his gun in half (a skill learned by taking the dangerous fire-sticks away from goats & saber-toothed tigers, no doubt). They get in a lucky shot with a rock & dunebuggy away (Pop-Eye calling back the bizarre taunt "So long, high pockets!" Anyone who understands that is encouraged to
    But heart-broken Eegah follows them into town, & shows up at a party just as Pop-Eye is getting into a fistfight with one of his band-members over the girl. The police show up, & Eegah pulls a pool ladder on them, so they shoot him. The movie ends like it ran, floating face down.
    REDEEMING FEATURES:
  • Richard Kiel plays a more likable character in Happy Gilmore
  • Those crazy backup vocalists!
  • When the whole caveman-unwanted-advances sequence is over.
  • High Pockets? High Pockets!? (the old explaination of High Pockets re-available now, as well as a new explaination).

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    Tarantula

    By contrast (with     Eegah, for example), this is a pretty decent monster film. It follows the life of a flying doctor in a cowboy-yokel town. Out in the country lives another doctor, of the mad-scientist variety, who probably can not pilot a plane. He can, however, diagnose a case of acronogalia at the drop of a [cowboy] hat. The mad scientist's colleague turns up dead & mutant-y, and the mad scientist attributes the death to this disease of the pituitary gland. The first doctor, who bares a remarkable resemblance to Vice President Al Gore, questions the mad fellow about how acronogalia could manifest itself within the span of a few days when it takes years to develop to the point of being fatal, & Dr. Nutty explains that "the study of science is the study of the unusual;" this is good enough for the pudgy sheriff. The Doctor goes back to his ranch of evil, and we see that he's been injecting vitamin stuff into animals to make them very large (he has a 2' long hamster, thanks to the magic of split-screen action) and then he is attacked by another lumpy-faced mutant. There is a fight, stuff breaks, and the 3'-wide tarantula they had around scuttles out the door before most of the lab burns up. The mutant is dying, but takes the time to jab a needle of the unstable vitamin into the professor's arm.
    We move to a scene where the Vice President is driving the professor's new Lady Scientist lab assistant out to the ranch of doom. They stop by some giant desert-rocks, & avoid being hit by a small rockslide caused by the Gigantic Spider that stays off-camera. Some things are killed and eatten (starting with cattle, but moving up to cattle ranchers, and then people unrelated to the longhorn industry). The professor is crabby to the lady when she brings Mr. Al Gore over to visit, but then the house is attacked & the mutating professor is nabbed by the spider. Dynamite does a cameo as an explosive that fails to kill the creature, but everything's fixed by a napalm strike, à la Colonel Kilgore.
    REDEEMING FEATURES:
  • The giant spider effects are actually rather good--it's a real spider, overlayed on the real scenes pretty well, with attention payed to its shadow & stuff.
  • The scene where the VP-lookalike is laughing that "now they've got female scientists." It took years before female scientists got the crummy monster movie respect they deserved--see Tremors with Kevin Bacon to see how far they've come, baby.
  • Giant piles of spider venom. Huge & gross as duck-droppings.
  • Watch in the hotel-lobby scenes, by the door: there's this couch which various yokelly-cowboy fellows sit. It must be the most exciting place in town, which is really kind of sad.
  • The "Greatful Dead" stained glass window in the corroner's office/funderal home.

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    The Unearthly

    John Carradine is back, and he's bad. Here he plays a kindly old doctor that runs a retreat for emotionally fragile people. He is very kindly and gains their trust by saying "I want you to trust me implicitly" in a friendly manner. He's trying to figure out how to add a new gland to the human body, to make it immortal. There's a guy that looks a little like the scary guy in     Carnival of Souls, who is in a rigid coma, eyes-stuck-open coma in the back room because of one of Carradine's failed experiments. Tor Johnson (the huge guy from Plan 9 from Outer Space) plays Carradine's loving henchman, Lobo. There's a brown-haired slutty lady, a moon-faced aggressive junky fellow who looks like Dan Tanna's gooney assistant from "Vegas," and the sweet, innocent new patient who suffers from lots of fear. Lobo can't make toast very well, we learn.
    Then a criminal "on the lamb" is caught hiding out in the garden. Lobo and Carradine brow-beat him into staying prisoner in the house, or they'll turn him over to the fuzz. He puts the moves on the paranoid girl, Carradine and his official spooky-chick love interest conduct an experiment on the brown-haired slutty girl (giving her skin that crispy breaded-coating look that sells so much Kentucky Fried Chicken), and the other three fellows try to escape. They are caught, and distract their guard, Lobo, with fairytales before the junky thoughtfully takes a bullet to let the crook & remaining woman escape. Oh, a little while earlier, that comatose guy was to be buried (alive, but not very lively) out back by Lobo. The criminal is around & opens up the coffin, & we see the guy moving about a bit. It's unclear what happens to the comatose guy at the time. The fuzz descends upon the place, there's a slightly twist-like part about one of the characters, and of course the comatose guy comes back (briefly) to the world of the living, with a knife. In a touching epilogue, the police enter the basement and see a room full of Carradine's failed experiments being freakish, and Lobo changes his name to Butterbean and becomes "King of the Tough Man Competition." Or maybe that's in the sequel.
    REDEEMING FEATURES:

  • Lobo gets some lines. He's not just another pretty face!
  • John Carradine has appeared in more of these movies than I'd like to count...but we love him so.
  • Lobo is very good with animals
  • Carradine's clever plan of making his patients officially "disappear:" having his weedy doctor friend throw their suitcase & coat off a bridge, thus establishing the patient's "suicide."

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    Killer Bats

    This is the predecessor to those "radiation makes animals Big" films. Here it is before mankind has discovered atomic mutation, so Bela has to grow his bats with electric current. Being safety-conscious, he only watches the bat-electrification through a pane of glass & some clear goggles. In a surprisingly odd plan, he has taught the bats to hate the "strange oriental aroma" that he gives to his victims as aftershave lotion with the innocent instructions "splash some of this on the vital areas of your neck." Then the bat goes & kills them on their walk home. A nerdy reporter and his incredibly nerdy photographer (whose nickname is "One-Shot," due to his propensity to carry fire-and-forget weapons like flintlock pistols and personal rocket launchers...but i kid; he's called 'One-Shot' because of his willingness to create fake photographic images) go and investigate. It turns out Bela has been making his employers, (a family of aftershave moguls), rich with his incredible formulas. However, Bela pulled a Mark Hammel--instead of going for company stock-options he chose a flat cash sum, so when the business skyrocketed, he got nothing and became real bitter. Thus, the logical course for revenge was this whole Tibetan-Aroma-Hating-Giant-Electrified-Bat thing.
    After One-Shot takes pictures of the aftershave mogul's French maid's legs, the two journalists are attacked by the bat (because of the aftershave). Fortunately, One-Shot is a main character and thus invulnerable, and 'reporter shoots bat dead.' Bela grows a new one, and the cycle repeats itself, except in a while he's killed by his own creation after taking out the chief mogul but failing to bat-murder the mogul's daughter.
    REDEEMING FEATURES:

  • The reporter's boss, with a slight speech impediment. His pronunciation of "photographer" rhymes with "petard"
  • One-Shot's doctored photo of a stuffed bat, where he fails to remove the "Made in China" label from the bat's wing
  • Mogul mogul mogul mogul mogul
  • Goofy bat effects

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    King of Kong Island

    Ugh. This is not a good film. The back of the box mentions King Kong, or some relative there-to, but that's a bald-faced lie. Monkeys have bald faces, actually, and are hairy most everywhere else--this is a tidbit of information that might be the most exciting thing you take away from this film. It appears to be about a supposedly-tough white guy somewhere in Africa, working as a mercenary. He's shot in the back when he turns his back on an untrustworthy man who I nicknamed Turk Scar, because his name was Turk & he has a big scar on his face. This unlucky fellow muddles through the dark jungle and the shadowy semi-plot, which involves going on a safari for a really rich guy with a disgusting wife or something, betrayal by someone whose sister is being held hostage by Turk Scar, a couple of attacks by remote-controlled monkeys, an underground headquarters where captured women are locked up while a scientist implants metal things in the heads of bad monkey costumes, etc. Oh, yeah, there's also this woman who was raised by gorillas(?), & is their friend.
    REDEEMING FEATURES:

  • Turk Scar!
  • It ends with a Reservoir Dogs-esque survivor ratio
  • Complete lack of any sort of connection/mention of Mr. Kong. I think there might have been an island involved somehow. It's been a while since I watched this, mercifully.
  • TURK SCAR!

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