Author: monsterhunter

Horrors of Spider Island (1960)

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Not as deliriously loopy as the similarly-themed Bloody Pit Of Horror, this movie is still able to generate some laughs that rapidly turn into groans with its tale of supposedly sexy dancers crash landing on an island inhabited by a giant spider. (There may have been a whole bunch of giant spiders, but all I saw was one frail looking thing hanging from some very visible rope.)

Gary hires a bunch of girls to go over to Singapore and dance. The hiring process consists of these women coming into his office and showing off their chunky legs to him and his female assistant. The girls are mainly distinguishable by their hair color, though there were two blondes so I had to go to the secondary identifier which was each one’s badly dubbed voice.

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Beach Blanket Bingo (1965)

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This was the first beach party I’d seen, so I wasn’t too sure what I was getting myself in for. I guess I imagined there’d be a little singing, probably a surfing contest against some snooty rich kids, and some square parents who thought all surfers were no good.

Other than the singing, I was completely off base, because instead of snobs vs. slobs and parents who just don’t understand, we had a comic relief biker gang, a sky diving story line, a pop singer named Sugar Kane, and a mermaid!

Beach Blanket Bingo is pretty close to the end of the cycle for these beach party movies and without having seen any of those others as of this writing, it’s difficult to say whether the film makers had exhausted their beach movie material or what, but you get the feeling watching the various storylines peter out at various points in the film, that they didn’t really have any solid ideas for what this movie was going to be about. Continue reading “Beach Blanket Bingo (1965)” →

Mr. Superinvisible (1970)

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Mr. Superinvisible is a landmark in the world of cinema chiefly because it proves that co-starring with Sandy Duncan and a duck in The Million Dollar Duck was not the nadir of Dean Jones’ career! To his credit, Dean at least did the honorable thing and did what so many of our other Silver Screen heroes of days gone by did when in need of easy money – he went to Italy!

And easier money was never to be had! Since this a flick where Dean plays a guy who turns invisible, he doesn’t even have to appear in most of it! Just a few days on set to humiliate yourself by wearing a dress or hiding your nasty bits with palm fronds and a couple of hours in the audio booth dubbing dialogue so bad even the regular crew of Italian dubbing masters couldn’t be persuaded to do it and BANG! Another six hundred bucks to pay off that 1970 Fiat 124 Sport Spider! Continue reading “Mr. Superinvisible (1970)” →

Smoke (1970)

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SmokeCoverI think Chris (Ron Howard) missed an important life lesson from his experiences with his dog Smoke. What Smoke showed Chris, but Chris was too busy pouting to see, was how you shouldn’t trust anybody and that when you are literally a red-headed step-child like Chris was in this movie, your best friend will ditch you as soon as he has the chance.

Take the best damn dog in the whole wide world, Smoke, for example. He’s all about sucking up to Chris when Chris is saving his pussy canine ass from certain death. They’re inseparable and we’ve got a couple of montages in the movie to prove it!

Chris and that crazy mutt would do anything for each other and stand toe to toe against any enemy, fighting the good fight, no matter the odds! At least until Smoke’s real owner shows up! Continue reading “Smoke (1970)” →

Curse IV: The Ultimate Sacrifice (1988)

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When you find out that Catacombs sat unreleased for a couple of years before someone retitled it Curse IV: The Ultimate Sacrifice, you can’t help but wonder what sort of theatrical tragedy is heinous enough that it was thought the film could be enhanced by pretending it was the third sequel in a movie series that was marked at once by both its obscurity and its progressively worse unrelated tales of killer meteors, radioactive snakes and African witch doctors.

And as soon as you realize it’s the sort of movie where Salami (Timothy Van Patten) from The White Shadow plays a priest battling a demon in the basement of an abbey, you quickly understand everything, and thank whatever benevolent god you choose to worship that Satan was never allowed to release a Curse V: The Really Final Ultimate Sacrifice. Continue reading “Curse IV: The Ultimate Sacrifice (1988)” →

Curse III: Blood Sacrifice (1991)

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Curses involving goats have always haunted mankind. The most infamous is of course the one that Billy Sianis unleashed upon the Chicago Cubs when he and his billy goat were ejected from a World Series game involving the Cubs in 1945. Rightfully angered (because everyone knows farm animals are huge baseball fans), Sianis declared that the Cubs would never win again. And guess what? To date, they not only went on to lose the 1945 Series, but have never been back to the Series since!

Curse III: Blood Sacrifce smartly takes this most primordial of fears (goats ruining our sports), not so smartly eliminates the sports angle, but redeems itself by substituting a witch doctor and a machete-wielding sea monster! Continue reading “Curse III: Blood Sacrifice (1991)” →

Curse II: The Bite (1989)

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Vacations are a funny thing. Depending on the circumstances they can go from awesome to disaster and back again with little warning. For example, when I was a kid in Chicago, my parents threatened each other with divorce while we stayed in some flea bag motel, but then my sister had to ruin all those good vibes when she threw a tantrum at the Field Museum.

Likewise, for Lisa (Jill Schoelen only two years removed from The Stepfather and her greatest success) there are break ups and screaming that mark her cross country holiday with her boyfriend Clark (soap opera legend J. Eddie Peck). Of course those involve Clark mutating into a snake, eating her pet birds, and worst of all, going on a murderous rampage and not killing Jamie Farr’s character. Continue reading “Curse II: The Bite (1989)” →