MST3K #604: Zombie Nightmare

It's #604, with more delinquents and a baseball-bat-wielding zombie.

Our movie this time is a low-budget Canadian rock-teen-horror-baseball-voodoo film (yes, ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE), featuring Adam West and Tia Carrere. A chunky baseball player stops two young punks from raping a young woman, and one of them stabs him to death, right in front of his son. Then, years later, his grown-up son prevents a robbery and gets coincidentally run down in front of the store. The new young punks (one is the son of the second, non-murdering punk from the prologue, and is also a rapist) drive off, leaving the son to die in the street. His mother calls on the young woman from the prologue, who luckily is a voodoo witch (there are lots of those in Montreal, doncha know?) and they revive the son. He's not really himself, though, just a vengeance-bent zombie.

Why you should always call before you dig.

There's a young cop trying to solve all the teen murders, and his boss (Mr. West, there), seems to know an awful lot of the players in this case. Since, as it turns out, he's the stabby rapey punk from the opening, and the old baseball guy gets zombified just long enough to drag him down to hell.

The movie is pretty bad, but it kinda knows it. (Or at least the creators did -- the DVD special feature has several of the stars talking about their reflections on the MST version of their film, and how much they liked the show even before they were on it.) Adam West wasn't quite in full self-parody mode yet, though that time wasn't far off. As a result, his character work and mustache are enacted seriously, even his breakdown during the scene pictured above.

A deleted scene from Batman Vs. Soup.

And since Adam's in the movie, it's only right that Mike and the bots spend a lot of time talking about Batman. Crow's even written a sketch about it, but he threw it out, so Mike's wearing those tiny shorts for no good reason. Besides all the obvious Batman jokes, there are also a decent amount of jokes about the Canadian setting (David Steinberg, Andrea Martin, Bob and Doug McKenzie, and even The Kids In The Hall get called out).

Sidebar: Boy, do I ever wish the Mads didn't wear that makeup for their voodoo phase. Okay, maybe even the makeup would be okay, but the Screamin' Jay Hawkins bone-in-nose getup is just so tasteless.

This is my second episode in a row to mention: The NRA, Peanut Buster Parfaits, Chi-Chi's, Frankenstein, an Orlon sweater, Elvis, and ABBA. It's the third to mention Happy Days (four out of the last five, and now retired). And three out of my last four episodes have mentioned The Dilly Bar (that's it, all Dairy Queen references are retired too).

A (dark) joke I had to look up: "Were they the Tonton Macoutes?"
A joke that didn't age well: "He's doing the Nestea Plunge!"
My favorite joke: "George Romero's Casey At The Bat." (Honorable mention to the garage door closing: "That's a really trivial use of her dark powers.")
Overall, I rate this one 6/10. The movie is too dark to see, too noisy to hear. The riffs are on point, but the movie is a tad too serious for me to fully enjoy.

Up next, I'm watching #616, Racket Girls.

A Spoopy Month #15: The last of the leftovers, warmed over and with some kinda weird sauce on top. What IS that?

It's time for the last batch of movie reviews from last year, and it's a weird mix indeed.

October 31, 2014:

(big inhale) Okay. So, yes, Tower of Terror isn't very good. And yes, the nominal star of this made-for-TV movie is Steve Guttenberg. But, again, I'll try to be positive:
A lot of this, like a LOT of it, was filmed at the attraction in Orlando. It's great to see close-ups of that setting, from angles we can't get to as guests.
Melora Hardin gets to sing in this, which she never got around to as Jan Levenson.
It's always nice to see Mike McShane in anything, even if his '97 appearance in this can't make up for his complete lack in involvement in the US Whose Line.
Um... well, it starts with "Sing, Sing, Sing (With A Swing)" which is a great song.
It's great that this film, while not officially related to the Twilight Zone in any way, adapts every other thing about the attraction, including dropping our heroes in a modern-day freefalling elevator, and even the random assortment of 1939 victims, who are all major characters in this.

Okay, enough positivity. I've been rewatching the first season of Twilight Zone this month, in between movies, and the writing on that is so damned adult. I just wish this had been written so adults, ones with full attention spans and active intellects, could enjoy this movie as much as their children would.

Well, it could be worse. It could be The Country Bears.

(And just in case you don't click through to that Wikipedia link, here's a neat piece of trivia. The writer/director of this is now a YA author, and he's written the bellboy from this film into his series as a very minor character. That's pretty cool.)

October 31, 2014:

The Astro Zombies: Whoo boy, now THIS is a bad one. I've only seen one other Ted V. Mikels film (Girl in the Gold Boots, on MST3K), and it was just as bad, but much more depressing. This one isn't depressing, just boring.
What's that you say? How can a film with reanimated solar-powered, radio-controlled corpses be boring?
Well, John Carradine can explain the process to us (and his greasy assistant) in minute detail. The film was written by Wayne Rogers, later to become TV's Trapper John, who is apparently the world's biggest electronics nerd (he's on the board of a company that makes semiconductors). I'm not smart enough to know why the technology in the film doesn't work in real life, but the film really really really wants us to believe it has scientific credibility. (The scientific equipment in the film was apparently scrounged from a dump. At one point, a body is stored in a freezer which is clearly a grocery-store frozen-food bunker.)
Not only is the mad scientist really boring, this movie has the world's worst spy. We see Tura Satana (Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill!) interrogate two people. The first one, she only asks him "Who are you?" (and her henchman has JUST read his ID from his wallet) and shoots him before he can answer. The second time, she's trying to recruit Carradine to reanimate corpses for her country's army, and shoots him less than two minutes into the process, after he's agreed to do so.
Starting in 2008, Mikels made three, count 'em, three sequels to this!
I have two more films (good ones, at least) to talk about tomorrow.
Happy Halloween, everyone!

November 1, 2014:

Eyes Without A Face, on the other hand, is really good. It's poetic and gorgeous, and the emotions in it are heartfelt. After the constant explanations of Astro Zombies, the almost underwritten script of this film (at least, the translated subtitles were pretty spare) is a relief. With that said, the director called it a movie of "anguish," rather than a horror film, and there's a surgery scene which is pretty hard to watch (at the Edinburgh Film Festival showing, reportedly seven people fainted).
Remember in my review of Shadow of the Vampire, which I compared to Night Tide, when I said I love genre films made by fine artists? This is another one of those, I think.
And, oddly enough, the plot for this is so obvious and horror-movie-like: a mad scientist, spurned by his colleagues, operating on humans, just like in The Atomic Brain and Astro Zombies, and several hundred other films (most better than those two examples).
We have one more spooky movie to talk about, and it's a pure delight. See ya tonight, folks.

November 1, 2014:

I Married A Witch: Here's a delightful piece of fluff to round out my month of spooky movies. It's a screwball romantic farce that begins with the eponymous witch being burned. She puts a curse on her accuser, and condemns his descendants to marry the wrong women, for all time.
Okay, so it's a little sexist -- the "wrong" women are pretty much all shrewish and controlling, as we see in a quick montage of 270 years, bringing us to the 1940s.
When the witch and her father are released from their eternal imprisonment by an errant bolt of lightning, she almost immediately decides to continue tormenting the latest descendant of the pilgrim who had her burnt, but her plan goes awry.
In the end, everything turns out for the best, despite the witch's vengeful father (played by Cecil Calloway, who I'd just seen that same day in a Twilight Zone episode, "Elegy," in which he plays a creepy caretaker and host to three astronauts millions of miles from Earth).
I think Veronica Lake is maybe a little too kittenish, even in the first part of this movie, to be truly believable as a vengeance-bound bride of evil. But those were different times, and it's hard to completely switch tones in a movie only 73 minutes long. Overall, good fun, even though I never cared for Bewitched (which, for legal reasons, was not based on this film.)
[So these last two movies I watched in conjunction with Greg Proops' other podcast, The Greg Proops Film Club. You can find those episodes here and here. He's been promising the Young Frankenstein episode, which I'm really looking forward to.]

Thanks for reading these old capsule reviews. All new stuff coming up, including some Halloweenish TV episodes and more movies and even more candy!

A Spoopy Month #9: More rehashed reviews

October 24, 2014:

Whoops, I missed my movie review yesterday. I'll try to squeeze in two today. The good news is, you've at least heard of both of them! In fact, we watched The Corpse Bride at Movie Night ages ago, though I didn't remember much of it. So I rewatched it.
I think I liked it a lot more the second time, though I still won't give Tim Burton any more credit as an original filmmaker, since this one is so incredibly similar to Nightmare Before Christmas.
I can't help but watch this and think of Tim Burton's personal life -- I'm surprised he didn't cast Helena Bonham Carter as the living girl, and Lisa Marie as the title character...

October 25, 2014:

So speaking of stop-motion animation, I next decided to rewatch one of the first stop-motion movies. King Kong wasn't the first (the same effects team worked on a 1925 film of Doyle's The Lost World), but it was the best. And, in many ways, it's still one of the most ground-breaking effects films ever. The team invented several important processes to marry stop-motion to live action film, in several different ways.
You all know I'm a big audio commentary nerd, and this was the very first movie ever to have a running audio commentary, thirty years ago! I haven't seen either of the remakes of this, but I'm strongly considering the 2005 version.
...and ten years later, the same studio, RKO, was still using a lot of the painted jungle backdrops from this movie. At least one appeared in I Walked With A Zombie.

October 25, 2014:

The Atomic Brain (AKA Monstrosity) is currently rated on IMDB as the 98th worst movie of all time. I think that's about right. [This is 2015 Mark breaking in to tell you this is no longer true. It's been upvoted in the last year, and no longer appears on the Bottom 100.] The movie concerns a prototypical mad scientist, who wants to expand the field of human transplantation, so he's been putting animal brains into people. He's got a guy with a dog brain, a lady with a cat brain, and at the end a cat with a lady brain (the physical size of the brain doesn't appear to matter -- he's such a good doctor he can fit a whole human brain into a cat's skull!). His old, rich employer, has hired three unsuspecting young ladies to have her brain implanted into them -- um, to clean her house.
This movie completes my trilogy of films featuring Americans doing horrible British accents -- the lady in this movie appears to forget at times she's supposed to be British. Really, the old lady from this movie was in Mary Poppins the next year, and Dick Van Dyke seems like a master of dialect compared to the actress from The Atomic Brain.
I'm kind of embarrassed, actually. I watched this whole thing without realizing it was on Mystery Science Theater. And that I'd seen the MST3K version. And that I owned it on DVD. And so I rewatched the MST version, and could only remember having seen a few of the host sequences... Anyway, it's in the public domain, so if you wanna watch it, there's a link at the bottom of that Wikipedia page.

October 26, 2015:

Night Tide. He was a sailor; she was a mermaid. Well, maybe she was.
This is the most surprising movie I've watched all month: it's certainly atmospheric, and it has a few "eerie, strange, macabre" scenes (to quote the poster), but it's neither a horror movie nor a monster movie. It's a pretty effective story, methinks, and this is one of the two new-to-me movies from this month I'll gladly watch again (the other is I Walked With A Zombie).
This has a few familiar faces in it: besides a young, fresh-faced Dennis Hopper, the evil old lady from The Atomic Brain plays a really sympathetic (and really accurate) fortuneteller, and Vincent Price's sister from Pit and The Pendulum is a sweet merry-go-round operator and dispenser of endless cups of coffee.
Almost the entirety of the action takes place on the Santa Monica Boardwalk, so this movie acts as a great time capsule of that place and time. Again, this one is in the public domain, and the bottom of that Wikipedia page has a link to watch it. This one's worth it.

Stay tuned, folks: our next capsule reviews include two vampire movies, a dreadful Disney family film, and a killer clown.

A Spoopy Month #6: More reposted reviews, repeated for your repleasure

Right. Four more capsule reviews from last year. Here we go!

October 19, 2014:

Here's Madhouse, the final Vincent Price movie in my li'l box set. Not a Corman, not a Poe. BUT, it does have clips in it from a lot of the Corman/Poe/Price films, and even claims to guest-star Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff since they appear in clip form. (And, oh yeah, it reuses the fiery climax of ...House of Usher again.)
What a weird movie -- an aging film star, suspected of murdering his wife, finally revives his most famous horror character but the shoot is marred by further murders. Is the film star responsible? He doesn't THINK so. Full of mid-70s British "contemporary" fashions, and even features Michael Parkinson for some reason.
We'll get into a few better movies, starting tomorrow...

October 20, 2014:

Immediately after they finished filming the original Cat People, but before it was released, producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur made I Walked With A Zombie. It's a voodoo picture based, loosely, on Jane Eyre. And it's the best, least exploitative voodoo picture I've ever seen. Voodoo is shown to be merely a tool, one which can be used for good or evil, rather than a soul-sucking weapon used by the evil people of color against the innocent white folks.
This movie is really, really good, and for a movie made exclusively by white folks in 1943, the characterizations of people of color are really well-done: interesting, distinct, and realistic. (Plus, the movie's treatment of the effects of past slavery, while not up to our current standards, are also realistic and as honest as any white capitalist could be in 1943. I think it helps that Tourneur was French and Lewton was Russian -- that is, they hadn't been raised in a country only a few decades out of slavery.)
Like Cat People, this is haunting and perfect. It makes me want to seek out all the other movies Tourneur directed. Tomorrow, another Lewton-produced horror film.

October 21, 2014:

It's got Karloff! It's got Lugosi! It's got thorny ethical questions based on an original story by Robert Louis Stevenson! It's The Body Snatcher! Oh, and it's got some truly questionable accents. (For a movie set in Scotland in the 1830s, there sure were a lot of bit players sounding suspiciously like 1940s Americans...)
So, real-life Britain had a shortage of cadavers for medical study, which led schools to post a no-questions-asked bounty, which started out with grave-robbing and led a few enterprising businessmen to eliminate the middleman and kill their own.
Karloff is menacing as all get-out in this. There's one truly haunting sequence told entirely in the dark, with no dialogue. (The technical spareness of the scene, and the fact that the crime takes place only in our minds, feels as exciting to me as the first time Eisenstein realized he could use editing to tell a story in Potemkin.)
For the record, this is not the alien takeover film The Invasion of The Bodysnatchers (which I've never seen).

October 22, 2014:


So, a short time before he wrote I Walked With A Zombie for Val Lewton, Curt Siodmak made up all the things we think we know about werewolves for The Wolf Man. I'd never seen this movie before, or any sequels, remakes, or even specific parodies, but I knew every beat in this story. I think that tells you a little about how influential this monster movie was. You can read all the trivia about makeup and such on that Wikipedia page there, so let me just say this:
The Universal monster movies (the original ones, at least -- I haven't bothered to watch many of the sequels) are at their best in creating atmosphere. And this movie has tons of it. Graveyards, foggy moonlit Welsh forests, even the dusty old manor house.
Later on, once I've gotten some sleep, I'm planning to draw up a little Venn diagram for the three early 40's movies I saw (these last three) and their intersecting themes and personnel. [Note from 2015 Mark: I never did this. Just note that Bela is in this, and this also shares some interesting brother issues with I Walked With A Zombie -- what was Siodmak's relationship like with his brother, I wonder?]
Final thought: this one's okay. It's no Dracula, and it's no Bride of Frankenstein. But, if it's on TV and you've got two hours to kill, it's much better than that Nightmare on Elm Street installment on the other channel.

Okay, that's another day's worth. The next four capsule reviews include two movies with stop-motion animation, and two no-budget public domain movies, one of which I adored.

A Spoopy Month #3: Some capsule reviews, part one

So this blog really started last October, when I watched 20 horror movies and posted capsule reviews for my close friends on Facebook. I didn't actually start this blog officially till December, but the reviews of Christmas TV were inspired by my enjoyment of reviewing stuff again. So I'm gonna repost those here. These are all short, so I'll post a handful at a time till I run out.


Oct 15, 2014:

I've been watching a lot of horror movies this October. I'll talk about one a day till the end of the month. I finally rewatched The Cabin in the Woods, off my new Bluray of it, and I think the second viewing is just as good as the first. That's a movie that will live in my head forever. Is it a metaphor for our military complex, or just a loving hate-letter to slasher movies? Me, I think it's a metaphor for our stupid lizard brains, the ones that lead us to consistently hurt others, purposely and accidentally, in an attempt to follow our own desires. But for all that, there sure are a lot of huge snakes, evil demons, and bloodgushers.
I'm not a big haunted house guy, but last year this was turned into two different houses: one at Universal Orlando, and one at Thorpe Park, which had branching hallways, so you could choose your own destiny to a point. Damn, I wish I could've seen one of those.

     

Oct 16, 2014:

So the second horror movie I saw this month was Roger Corman's 1961 adaptation of The Pit and The Pendulum. Well, I say "adaptation." Really, it only contains 1) A pit, 2) A pendulum, and 3) An Inquisition-era torture chamber. All the rest is an invention of Richard Matheson, who also published his short story "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" the same year. It's barely related to Poe, but it's not otherwise bad: production values are pretty good. And, though his acting is far from subtle, this was before Vincent Price had descended into Shatnerian levels of self-parody. If you wanna watch a 1961 movie about torture and psychosexual horror, this isn't a bad choice.

While I don't like the style of the fantasy sequences much, I love that Corman shot them in black and white because he'd read that, at the time, psychologists believed most people dreamed that way.

 

Oct 17, 2014:

Corman's fourth Poe film, Tales of Terror, is a compilation of three short films, each starring Vincent Price. The first, "Morella," is a fairly straightforward retelling of that story, reusing (for at least the second time) the house-consuming fire footage from his first Poe film, Fall of the House of Usher. The second short is the best, entitled "The Black Cat" but much more inspired by "The Cask of Amontillado." It's great fun to watch Price and Peter Lorre have a wine-tasting competition, and you just know Lorre's breakdown at the end of the story is going to be big, big, big. The third, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," has Basil Rathbone as an evil hypnotist, changing the original story into a revenge tale (so all three stories share that theme.) I think this is the best of the three Corman Poe movies I watched this month. The digest format makes sure that things move along at a brisk pace, and there's very little slowness to it.

Oct 18, 2014:

Roger Corman's seventh (!) and penultimate Poe adaptation, The Masque of the Red Death, represented a change in production and style for the series. It was filmed in London (to take advantage of certain tax schemes) and credited a lot of British people who did little work on the actual movie. Like "The Black Cat" from Tales of Terror, Masque... interpolates another Poe story into the action. "Hoptoad" is a Poe story I was completely unfamiliar with until this film, and its inclusion is one of the best aspects of the script. For some unknown reason, the decadent Prince Prospero is a Satanist in this version of the story, and there's a lot of nonsense about worshiping The Dark One and "Your God is dead." The script for this wasn't written by Richard Matheson, but two other TV writers, Charles Beaumont (who wrote a lot of Twilight Zones) and R. Wright Campbell, who mostly worked on Westerns. I wouldn't bother with this, unless you're the most obsessed Poe completist in the world.
One footnote: the sweet, innocent ingenue of the movie is played by a young British model and actor named Jane Asher. The story goes that, during filming in '63, her boyfriend, a musician, was about to play his first London gig and he visited her on set the day prior. Corman met him, declined an invitation to attend the show, and wished him luck. That kid's name was Paul McCartney. So the story goes, but the story comes from Corman, and I suspect he's a bit of a fabulist and self-promoter above all else...

So the next four year-old reviews I'll post include one last Price/Corman film and three early horror films from the 40's. Stay, as they say, tuned!