Burl reviews The New Gladiators! (1984)

It's Burl roaring up to you on his customized dirt bike! Ha ha, I’m here to review an action picture by the famed Italian horror meister Lucio Fulci! Old Lucio was better known for his zombie pictures and, before those, his own crude takes on the giallo genre (The Lustful Duckling Winks Nine Times I believe is one of his!), but this futuristic effort takes him out of his comfort zone and puts him firmly in Death Race 2000 territory!

I guess technically The New Gladiators is meant as a cross between Death Race 2000, Rollerball, The Road Warrior and Blade Runner, but it most closely manages to rip off The Running Man, even though that movie hadn’t yet been made! And still it manages to get in some of Fulci’s trademark grue!

Ha ha, the year is 2072 and everybody likes violent TV! The best-loved show is a kind of jousting game called Kill Bike, but the popularity on that one is waning so the crafty, ratings-hungry robots that run the world decide they need an even bloodier game! Ha ha, they come up with The Battle of the Damned, which is also a motorcycle game, but played out by death-row convicts who have nothing left to lose!

A trio of whistling new-wave assassins set in motion a series of events designed to force Drake, the best dirt-bike warrior of the future, to take part in the games! Meanwhile Sam, the ruthlessly avuncular Big Brother type who runs all TV on the planet (or something!) has a nefarious agenda of his own! And then Fred Williamson shows up just like he did in Warriors of the Wasteland, here wearing an even more outlandish outfit!

I’ve got to say, this is a silly picture! But it sure is entertaining! The many shots of the futuristic cityscape, which are meant to look like Blade Runner but come off more like a particularly ambitious ad for model toys, get a lot of grief in the reviews, but I loved them! Sure they look fake, but there’s a strange beauty there and a conviction of its own effectiveness that carries the day! And there are many other visual tropes that give this picture its own special look – ha ha, why use a four-point star filter when a eight-point one will do!

As I mentioned, there’s lots of blood and gore, with dummies in white jumpsuits suffering many decapitations (remember Eye of the Tiger?) and impalings! There’s also a fellow with a melty face who reminded me of the Robert Joy character in George Romero’s Land of the Dead! (Maybe Romero thought “Ha ha, that Lucio has taken enough from me over the years, now I’m going to borrow something from him!”) But where the movie stumbles for this reviewer is in its action scenes! Ha ha, there are many more exciting ways to shoot motocross duels than what Fulci comes up with, that’s for sure! There’s no particular excitement, and the participants are all pretty anonymous in their jumpsuits and helmets anyway!

It’s too bad, because this could have been a modern classic of camp! It’s halfway there at least, so it’s certainly worth watching for the discerning viewer! I give The New Gladiators two magic palm-rays!

Burl reviews Alien Predators (1987)

Hi, Burl here! I remember watching Alien Predators way back in high school! I probably watched it with my good friend Doug, and if I remember correctly, we both thought it was boring and uneventful! I couldn’t remember much about it, except that someone got a head shaped like a football, and that there was an RV in it!

That’s why I even bothered watching it again: the RV! Ha ha, I love an RV movie, especially when there’s a siege scene, or at least a scene of menace! I’m sure you’ve all seen that terrific picture Race With the Devil – that’s more or less the model for this microgenre as far as ol’ Burl is concerned!

This picture, which was directed by the son of the guy who made Vanishing Point, takes place in Spain for reasons I never figured out! But the main cast, three young people driving around the country in a rented RV, are all American, and three more annoying people you’d be hard pressed to ever meet! Ha ha, there’s two fellows and a girl, and it’s kind of a friendly romantic triangle that never turns into the Jules et Jim situation that would have made it more interesting! No, they’re all stuck in the aggressive flirtation stage of their isosceles, and something about the way they prosecute it makes them seem kind of dim-witted! At any rate, it takes up way too much screen time!

The actual plot is supposed to be about an alien virus which crash-landed on Earth along with Skylab, and now, some years later, has infected the citizens of a small Segovian town, the very town our troika of heroes is fun-truckin’ their way through! A Spanish NASA scientist explains all this to the kids, and informs them that head-bursting is part of the infection process! Yes, we do get to see a head bursting right at the end of the picture, and it’s not too bad! Really adds some spice to the thing, and spice is something this movie desperately needs!

An exotic if perplexing setting, some head-bursting and an RV – those are the ingredients for a magic sauce! But this picture is no magic sauce – it’s barely worth a hucklebuck! It encourages lots of questions, though! Ha ha, who is the fellow in the neat-looking truck? Is he meant to be an alien-possessed madman? And why is there a big NASA laboratory in Spain? Don’t they do all their work in Florida or Texas, somewhere like that?

There’s a bit of a siege against the RV, but it’s limited to a short bit involving an ugly alien crab chattering at the window, like a lost scene from Without Warning or something like that! Ha ha, it could have been a lot more exciting, and you can say the same for the entire movie!

I feel like I’ve been down on a lot of movies for the same reasons of late: namely, that they’re sadly deficient in eventfulness and action! I really should seek out some pictures that Deliver The Goods, which is what I always hope for when I sit down to watch a movie like this! Well, there are some goods delivered – what special effects there are, and what can be made of them through the murky photography, appear to be pretty good, and come courtesy of Mark Shostrom, the man behind the trick effects of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and The Supernaturals!

Otherwise I don’t have a lot of marvelous things to say about Alien Predators, and I guess I’ll give it one irritating venetian blind shadow!

Burl reviews Zone Troopers! (1985)

Hi, ha ha, it’s Burl to review one of those Charles Band productions from the 1980s! I actually saw a few of these things in the theater if you can believe it, pictures like Ghoulies, The Dungeonmaster and of course Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn! Looking back it seems incredible that such cheeseball little movies ever saw the light of a cinema projector, but these were different times!

I don’t know what sort of theatrical release Zone Troopers got, but I don’t think it ever made it to my neck of the woods! I didn’t even bother catching it on video ever, so when I recently spied a VHS copy for sale in a Times Square video shoppe – ha ha, I was just there for the regular movies, I swear! – I snapped it up! (Turns out the movie just got some kind of on-demand DVD release or something, so maybe that’s why someone dumped their VHS!)

It’s a WWII story, set in Italy in 1944 during the hard-fought Allied campaign up that benighted peninsula! There’s a big Wehrmacht assault at the beginning which thins the squadron of Yanks down to four: The Sarge, Mittens, Joey and a newly-arrived war correspondent named Dolan! This is pretty much our cast for the rest of the movie, though there are some Nazis (with a special appearance by Hitler, ha ha!) and some aliens. And of course there’s the main alien, who’s been trapped by the Germans and who looks like a mime with the head of a spider! And he eats cigarettes for dinner!

The doughboys save him and manage to reunite him with his alien friends (who don’t have bug heads, but certainly possess frosted tips), and they get some help in vanquishing the Wehrmacht! Not all of these old boys make it through the adventure, though, so the ending is bittersweet!

This movie is pretty beloved in some circles, and I guess it has a nice pulpy feel, a modicum of ambition and a little more wit and intelligence than your average cheap programmer! Certainly it outdoes most of the other Empire pictures of the day! I was prepared to really like Tim Thomerson’s performance as the Iron Sarge, since he’s perfect for the role and also is someone I’ve met and hung out with, and who was a nice guy, very funny! But he overdoes the squarejaw routine here, and his performance is pretty lifeless, never conveying the legendary aura the Sarge is clearly supposed to have!

I actually preferred the performances of the guy who played Dolan, the correspondent – he was a doughy middle-aged guy, but he had an appealing surfer’s drawl that I thought fit the part well! You believed he might be a writer! The fellow who played Mittens was good too, and the scene where he slugs Hitler in the jaw is pretty delightful! The alien, meanwhile, is kind of forgettable, and not a terribly good trick effect! It was created by John Buechler, but it’s no Cellar Dweller, ha ha!

The movie’s certainly not unenjoyable, but there’s not that much to it! It’s hard to rate a movie that rises above expectations but falls short of possibilities, so I’ll just give it two Kilroy drawings and leave it at that!

Burl reviews Death Moon! (1978)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here with another TV movie for you! Boy, I’ve never watched so many TV movies as I have since beginning this movie review blog! I don’t know why, but I’ve really been enjoying the suckers! I suppose it recalls a time in my life when movies like Curse of the Black Widow and Cruise Into Terror and This House Possessed and Snowbeast were about all I could watch, since I was too young to go to the movies by myself and there were no VCRs yet!

Unlike those other movies I just mentioned, Death Moon is not a picture I recall from the heady days of my youth, even though it was apparently broadcast in late May of 1978, which should have placed it right in my prepubescent crosshairs! Perhaps it simply wasn’t broadcast in my region! Or maybe the tumblers of fate weren’t going to click into place until I was good and ready to accept the full, fierce beauty of the movie’s concept: a Hawaiian werewolf!

Ha ha, you read that right! Robert Foxworth, whom we know so well from Prophecy and – well, that’s about all I know him from, besides his small role in Damien: Omen II and maybe his appearance in that other TV movie It Happened at Lakewood Manor, a.k.a. Ants! – plays Jason Palmer, one of those overstressed businessmen who’s always waking up shaking and sweating from accursed dreams involving a fearsome tiki! His sawbones recommends a vacation, and the next thing you know, Jason Palmer is in Kauai, wearing a tiny blue bathing suit and gamely seeking some relaxation!

But as Jason begins his program of relaxation by squiring about a blonde businesslady, and as Rick, a ladies’ man hotel detective, chases a burly room thief, the werewolf attacks begin, and people are being torn apart all over the place, a fresh outrage each night! Ha ha, it goes on for a week or so, and that’s a lot of full moons! The house dick (who with his Ken doll face and receding hairline looks like a perfect telepod cross between Crown International superstars Bill Adler and James Daughton) begs the local cop to be allowed to help solve the murders, but everyone tells him to concentrate on catching the room thief! But when the room thief becomes a werewolf victim, Rick is able to turn the full force of his investigative prowess on the case!

The unfortunate room thief, by the way, is played by Charles Haid, whom we know from Ken Russell’s great Altered States! It’s funny: Haid is so good at playing a bigmouth blowhard, and here he is in a role which gives him no lines at all, until his werewolf encounter anyway, and then he only screams! And he’s the most unsubtle sneakthief ever, too! Ha ha, he wears loud shirts, smokes a stogie and weighs about two hundred and fifty pounds, and you have to consider that Rick might be a bit of an idiot not to have been able to catch him!

He also doesn’t think there might be a werewolf loose despite coming face-to-face with the leisure suit-wearing fiend in the movie’s finest scene! Ha ha, it only lasts a second, but it’s worth a rewind on the ol’ VHS to see Rick’s lycanthrope encounter one more time, I can tell you!

The trouble with Death Moon is it’s nowhere near as good as we all want it to be, given the fantastic concept and the era in which it was made! There’s not much Hawaiian atmosphere, and if I didn’t know better I’d say it might as well have been filmed in Southern California! And Robert Foxworth without a beard is a little strange – his curly hair and weasel face put him in the Marjoe Gortner category, almost! But still, you can’t argue with the idea of a Hawaiian werewolf no matter how direly executed, and I give Death Moon one and a half fake gurning tikis!

Burl reviews Piranha! (1978)

Hi, Burl here to review a fine old classic about munching fish! Ha ha, I’m talking about Piranha, the great original that was such a marvelous rip-off of Jaws that Steven Spielberg himself apparently championed it when Universal Pictures was mulling an infringement lawsuit!

But Piranha is its own thing, most definitely! It’s a Joe Dante picture, and you all know what that means: Dick Miller is in it! He plays a good, meaty role, essentially the Murray Hamilton part from Jaws, but with a lot more humour and dimension! Ha ha, he’s as great as ever, and his reaction shots to the things his glasses nerd assistant says are priceless!

It seems that a scientist played by Kevin McCarthy, who was in almost as many Joe Dante movies as Dick, created the mutant piranhas to destroy any ‘Cong who dared dip a toe in the waterways of Vietnam, but they were never used! I guess they’ve been languishing around in this strange swimming pool for years! And then two teens get the Big Munch, and our heroes turn up and immediately manage to release the fish into the river! Ha ha, they never really apologize for that one, but at least they try to help!

I could go on about the cast of this movie! Dick Miller is there of course, and McCarthy, but we also get the great bellowing deaf man Keenan Wynn whom you’ll remember from The Dark; the spooky Barbara Steele from Shivers and of course the hero, Bradford Dillman, whom we know from that fine 70s classic Bug! The fate that befalls old Keenan is particularly gruesome and has stayed with me every time I sit on a dock and let my feet dangle in the water!

A lot of people object to the strange little monster seen in the laboratory, but I think it’s a marvelous addition to the picture! I’m also pretty fond of the piranha fish themselves, who seem whipped up into such a frenzy that you’re afraid they’ll just wiggle themselves into a heart attack or a stroke! And they make a funny noise: rrrrrrrrrrrr! You have to hear it to know what I’m talking about!

Anyway, Piranha is a fine little picture with its heart in the right place, and I’ll always be glad it was made! Thank you Joe Dante, John Sayles and Roger Corman and everybody else too! I give Piranha a solid three disintegrating rafts!

Ha ha, a little note! Sorry I haven’t been putting up too many reviews lately! I’ll try to step it up a bit! Thanks for sticking with me, everybody!

Burl reviews Sorority Girl! (1957)

Hi, Burl here to review a movie about sorority girls! Ha ha, not for the first time either! But this one is actually called Sorority Girl, and it’s another Roger Corman drama movie much like Carnival Rock, which it strongly resembles! Like that picture it features the tragic and beautiful Susan Cabot and the fantastic Dick Miller, and like that picture too it weaves exploitable elements into what might best be described as kitchen-sink character drama! Or maybe the weaving goes the other way around, hard to say!

Cabot plays a rich sorority girl in Beta Pi or Sigma Ki or whatever – ha ha, it’s all Greek to me! – and has failed to make any friends there merely because of her mean, haughty attitude, her sadism, her spiteful remarks and her constant air of exasperated superiority! Barboura Morris, even more gorgeous here than she was in A Bucket of Blood, is the good-girl sister-with-a-secret, and Dick Miller plays a local guy who I’m not sure is a student or not, but who owns the local rock-dancing club! He’s the voice of reason, just like he was in Carnival Rock!

Cabot has a gooney-bird of a girl under her complete command, and uses this hapless lönguebönes to help her play mean-spirited tricks on the other girls! She engages in meddling and blackmail and brutal spankings! It’s up to Dick Miller to save the day when her scheming puts the life of one girl at risk!

Ha ha, there’s a bit of rock and roll in this picture, a smidgen of heavy petting and the dramatic centerpiece, the spanking scene! But there’s also a lot of bitchy bickering, wailing, simpering and pleading! It sure is dramatic! And my reading of the very end is that it’s about to get much more dramatic as Cabot’s character walks grimly into the sea, but nowhere else have I seen this coda mentioned! Maybe it’s obvious to everyone else that she’s just going for a swim to cool off! Ha ha!

There’s lots to recommend this sixty-minute special! Obviously Dick Miller is a huge plus, as always, and Cabot and Morris are both gorgeous and convincing! Like Carnival Rock once again, this picture has a bizarre and surreal opening-credits sequence that leaves you a little disconcerted! It’s written and directed with the punchy zing you expect from a Roger Corman film, yet it can also seem a million minutes long if you’re tired or not in the mood! Ha ha, I recommend tracking it down anyway and giving it a look! And at least the VHS box has that terrific picture depicting Miller in his natural state: surrounded by beautiful ladies! I present Sorority Girl with two and a half freshly washed stockings!

Burl reviews Wild on the Beach! (1965)

Hi, Burl here! Ha ha, do you love a beach movie as much as I do? I’m not necessarily talking about those Frankie and Annette movies, although they have their pleasures! I’m thinking more of the non-A.I.P. ones of the same period, pictures like Ride the Wild Surf and It’s A Bikini World, and some of the more recent Crown International classics like Malibu Beach and The Beach Girls! Sunset Cove and Beach House are pretty good non-Crown examples!

Well, I thought I might have unearthed a rare gem when I found a VHS copy of Wild on the Beach for sale! I’d never even heard of it! Word on the picture turned out not to be good, but I’m well-practiced at shoving aside bad notices and watching a movie anyway!

It turns out the naysayers were right about one thing: there’s virtually no beach in Wild on the Beach! After some stock beach and surfing footage under the titles, we repair into a beach house and rarely leave again, and if we do it’s to go to a university office or a bar or another beach house! But guess what: beach houses and beach bars are great places to set a movie! I’ve always had a deeply romanticized notion of beach houses and have always wished to own one, and even though the interiors of this particular beach house were obviously sets in some rented soundstage somewhere, just knowing they were supposed to be in a beach house was kind of thrilling!

The plot is kind of similar to both Beach House and The Beach Girls! In all cases there are two competing parties vying for the full use of a beach house! Here the stakes are higher than simple beach-life enjoyment, ha ha! A young lady named Lee is planning on living in her deceased uncle’s beach house and renting the other rooms to cover her tuition, but a young fellow named Adam is already there with a bunch of his buddies, staking a squatter’s claim on the residence and also some vague story about his father’s friendship with the deceased uncle! There’s an oft-mentioned campus housing shortage and an unlikely new rule from the board about how students who can’t find school-sanctioned housing must withdraw from their courses and find somewhere else to get an education!

Soon Lee and Adam are racing to be the first to get the necessary permits to make the house an official student residence! That strategy didn’t make much sense to me, but ha ha, what do I know about university housing regulations of the 1960s! I do know that I find endless repetition of the word “permit” a little stifling, especially it they pronounce it “per-mit,” as if it was a verb, rather than the more normal “per-mit!”

There’s also middle-aged men galore if that's your thing! We’ve got a slaphead university employee who keeps searching the beach house, an angry dean who’s a cross between John Vernon in Animal House and the head elf from the Rudolph Christmas special, and a beach neighbour who’s a would-be record producer and would-be lothario who chugs pitcher-fulls of martinis! Where most movies in the genre end with a dance party on the beach, this one ends with a dance party in the beach house! Ha ha! And there’s a rousing musical number from The Astronauts, singing a song of warning about Speedy Gonzales! (You can see that number here!)

It’s not a great movie, but it has many small pleasures woven through it! But where most beach party movies are filmed in widescreen and bright colours, this one is black-and-white and stubby! I wonder if they couldn’t afford colour and so decided to set their movie largely indoors, or if they looked at the lack of beach scenes in their script and decided they may as well shoot in monochrome? It’s a puzzlement! Anyway, I give Wild on the Beach one and a half surprise appearances by Sonny and Cher!

Burl reviews Curse of the Black Widow! (1977)

Hi, Burl here with a review of a TV movie! I haven’t reviewed too many of these old boys so far – This House Possessed and The Horror at 37,000 Feet are probably about it – but I usually enjoy watching them! Like This House Possessed, this is one I watched on or near its original broadcast, and it scared the terwilligers out of me! I’ve mentioned my gut-churning terror of giant spiders before, in the review of The Strange World of Planet X, I think, and it’s my belief that my viewing of Curse of the Black Widow as an impressionable young chap was the inspiration for this life-long phobia! (I’m not scared of spiders in general though, just enormous ones that might try to eat me! Ha ha!)

As in any TV movie of the era that had to stretch itself out to 104 minutes, there’s an awful lot of padding filling out this Naugahyde package, but the basic story of Curse of the Black Widow runs as follows: a glamorous mystery lady is stalking Los Angeles bars, picking up men in sport coats and then terrifying them in some unspecified manner and leaving them drained husks, often swathed in mysterious webbing! Ha ha, turns out she’s a were-spider, and hot on her trail is smooth-operating consulting detective Tony Fransciosa, well known from Death Wish II, and a gruff police investigator played by Vic Morrow from Humanoids From the Deep! Ha ha, Vic Morrow’s character is named Conti, but for some reason Fransciosa always calls him “Gully!”

Anyway, as per many TV movies and most Dan Curtis productions, there’s a lot of family drama woven into this situation, along with several strange time-wasting digressions and an often-inappropriate musical score, as well as many hideous sport coats! This is why I’m a big fan of so many Dan Curtis productions, in particular Trilogy of Terror, which was the first horror movie I ever saw, and Burnt Offerings, one of Dan’s rare theatrical efforts! (I never was a Dark Shadows fan, however – it just seemed like any other soap opera to me, with a few extra drifts of fog here and there!)

I became pretty confused about two thirds of the way through Curse of the Black Widow when a number of older ladies started showing up and the family drama bit really kicked in! I must not have been paying enough attention, because I really had no idea who was who, what their relationships to one another were and what the conflicts were all about! But being totally at sea didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the picture one bit, ha ha!

And what a cast! Vic Morrow always plays a good grouch, and Max Gail plays, yes, a disheveled cop, this time named “Rags” instead of Wojo! The mysterious old ladies are played by the likes of June Allyson and June Lockhart! Sid Caesar and Jeff Corey play two of the padding-providing ancillary characters, Pinky Tuscadero plays “Flaps,” the secretary, and there’s a great cameo from none other than Hard Boiled Haggerty, playing a man who once saw the giant spider but no one believed him!

The actual giant spider, when we finally see it at the end, is a little bit fake looking, I have to say! It’s still plenty scary though, especially when you’ve got a phobia like mine! I give Curse of the Black Widow two and a half bargain-basement arachnoid transformations!

Burl reviews Goin' All the Way! (1982)

Ha ha, Burl here to review a movie about the frustrations of young people! Here is a movie that, as the back of the video box says, is “Goin’ All the Way to the screen all fun-packed high good times!” Yes, that’s what it says! And even though it makes no sense at all, it’s still a pretty good précis of the oddity that is Goin’ All the Way!

There are a few classic story templates out there that get used over and over again! The Odyssey is one of them of course, and Romeo and Juliet, and still another is Archie Comics, which is the model heavily relied upon by Goin’ All the Way! The Archie figure is here called Artie Mulligan, and he’s a sort of gormless, halfway-handsome lug of a guy, and the Veronica proxy is his girlfriend Monica, who won’t make love to him! Ha ha, hard to blame her! Artie’s rascally friend Reggie – ha ha, they didn’t even bother trying to find a different name for this fellow – convinces him that taking Monica to a motel would get the old flywheel spinning! But Monica throws a Cornish Hen, which is a sort of tantrum way out of proportion to the perceived offence, and kicks Artie to the curb!

Well! There’s a subplot involving wrestling women that kicks in at around this point, and the connection between the two narrative strands is the Big Moose stand-in, here called Bronk! (Bronk, by the way, is played by none other than Johnny Big Head from Surf II!) Anyway, Bronk’s girlfriend Candy, aka Midge, shows an interest in Artie now that he’s fancy-free; and somehow Monica hooks up with some kind of 70s holdover guy who declares himself “a songwriter – among other things!” He’s the slimiest character seen on film since the yachtsman from Summer Night Fever!

It all comes to a raging climax at a Sadie Hawkins dance, of all things! Everyone’s wearing hayseed outfits, except for Reggie who’s dressed like Nahalla from The Ghost Dance! Ha ha, were Sadie Hawkins dances ever really a thing? Not where I come from they weren’t, I can tell you that! I won’t tell you how it all works out except that it’s exactly as you expect it will, with the addition of a final shot involving Bronk standing there hog-tied, naked and shaved bald as a cueball!

This is a Teen Sex Comedy all right, but a strangely lifeless one despite all the weird goings-on! The wrestler girls are an odd addition to the formula, and the Sadie Hawkins dance is a head-scratcher too! Bronk is a pretty unpleasant character – it always seems like he might turn nice, but he just gets worse as the picture goes on! But there’s something so basic about the movie that I kind of liked it anyway, despite all the undeniable lamenesses which abound! It’s worth seeing for the recording studio scene alone, which rivals the famous one in Pod People! I give Goin’ All the Way a solid one and a half weird bike-riding fantasy scenes!

Burl reviews Matinee! (1993)

B’dee, b’dee, b’dee, it’s Burl! That “b’dee” business was supposed to be the noise of Twiki the robot for you, but I’m not sure if I spelled it right! And what does Twiki have to do with Joe "Explorers" Dante’s marvelous movie Matinee? Exactly nothing! It was just fun to type, ha ha!

I’ve already tipped my hand, I guess: I’m a fan of Matinee! Not only does it feature such delights as The Shook-Up Shopping Cart (with an early appearance by Naomi Watts of Mulholland Drive fame), but it teams up my favourite actor, Dick Miller, with John Sayles, a director, screenwriter and sometime actor I greatly admire! And plus it has John Goodman in it, straight out of C.H.U.D., and he's an actor I always enjoy, and lots of other stalwarts in the cast too; and the cream in the coffee is a grand re-creation of the 1950 giant monster pictures I love so well!

Ha ha, the picture is set in Key West at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis! There’s a kid named Gene who loves horror pictures and also a William Castle-like impresario arriving in town to show off his new gimmick-laden monster movie Mant just as the nuclear hysteria reaches its peak! There’s a subplot about another kid who likes a girl, but that girl has an imbecilic, violence-prone boyfriend who just came out of the reformatory and is itching to pound his young rival’s face into face-paste! Ha ha!

And that’s about it for the movie’s story! It’s a movie of incidentals, but our great good fortune as viewers is that these incidentals are so very splendid! You get Miller from Get Crazy and Sayles from Piranha as supposed morality crusaders whipping the citizenry of Key West into anti-Mant outrage! Of course they’re actors hired by Goodman’s Castle stand-in to help publicize the picture! (Miller can be seen standing in the background of the Mant sequences, wearing an army helmet and clutching a huge bag of sugar!) And David Clennon, Palmer from The Thing, is on hand as a beatnik dad! (Ha ha, funny thing - Robert Cornthwaite from The Thing From Another World is in here too, so both versions of the space invader story are represented!)

The Key West setting is very nice, and the period details are grand! If I’d been Gene, I would have had a big crush on the beatnik girl with the ironed hair too! And then there’s Mant itself, from which we are generously shown many scenes, and it’s pretty wonderful! Any student of the 50s big bug movies and/or William Castle will recognize that it’s not exactly accurate – William Castle never made a big bug picture, and based on the elaborate effects, Mant’s budget looks to be bigger than that of Them!, which no other big bug picture ever was! (Them!, by the way, is a great picture, one of my favourites, and not just because it has an exclamation point in the title!) They were also long done with big bug movies by the early Sixties, except for a Fly movie here and there; and frankly the guy who plays the Mant itself has a contemporary-sounding voice that hurts the verisimilitude a bit!

But such inaccuracies are meaningless, since after all the spirit of the era is captured perfectly, and that’s the important thing! The picture’s also often quite funny! It can get a little sentimental here and there, but never too much! If I’d been thirteen or fourteen when I saw this, it probably would have been one of my favourite movies ever! As it stands, it still ranks pretty high! I give Matinee three and a half flying rubber professor movies!