Category: 1950s

I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957)

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Could someone get Teenage Frankenstein some antiperspirant? It isn’t bad enough that he’s made out of smelly, rotted body parts, but the dude’s got Frisbees as well!

Surely if Dr. Frankenstein was smart enough to play God and get his teenage protege up and around, he could at least provide him with the most rudimentary of personal hygiene equipment. After all, you wouldn’t let your Teenage Frankenstein wipe his reanimated ass with his recently stitched on hand would you? Then how could you let him stink the joint up when he’s out strangling hussies? All the police have to do is follow the B.O. back to your secret lab! Continue reading “I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957)” →

I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)

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I Was A Teenage Werewolf never explains why poor old Tony is dispatched with wimpy police issue bullets. And if you think that I just laid a real smelly dog turd of a spoiler on your front lawn there, try to remember that a teenage werewolf whose transformations are triggered by the school bell probably isn’t a prime candidate to reach old age, even in dog years! I mean that sucker is going to be growing fangs and eating teachers and students about what – 14 or 15 times a day? Someone is bound to eventually notice that!

Tony is just your average high school kid with an anger management problem. He’ll fight you just as soon as look at you and he doesn’t mind fighting dirty if that’s what the situation calls for! Whether this involves swinging a shovel at another guy during one of his after school fights or chucking dirt in his opponent’s eyes, one thing is for sure: Tony is in it to win it. To him, second place is the first loser. Continue reading “I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)” →

Terror from the Year 5000 (1958)

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Terror From the Year 5000 PosterWhen I first heard that there was a movie called Terror from the Year 5000, my mind went into hyperdrive at the possibilities!

What would this terror from three millennia in the future be like? Would it be some hideous monster bent on sucking our souls out through our nostrils in order to feed its black hole heart? Or maybe some type of overgrown insect cyborg unleashed by a secret cabal of scientists to cleanse the Earth after the Last Great War of 3255?

Heck, it might even be a human so advanced that he’s pure energy, whose only desire is to enslave us to do his dark bidding! In short, this Terror could have been anything and in any event was probably simply beyond my puny 21st century brain to comprehend! Continue reading “Terror from the Year 5000 (1958)” →

Donovan’s Brain (1953)

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I don’t know where all the flying brains were in this movie. If you’ve got yourself an early 1950s movie about a killer brain, it either ought to fly around or have grown to gargantuan size, preferably both. The only thing the brain in this one does is sit in a bunch of dirty water in a fish aquarium!

Now you can’t just up and order yourself a human brain from Amazon.com or someplace (at least the last time I checked you couldn’t), so just how does Dr. Patrick Cory get his mad scientist hands on one? Continue reading “Donovan’s Brain (1953)” →

The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)

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There’s been some iffy Best Picture winners in the history of the Academy Awards. Mrs. Miniver‘s win back in 1942 over Kings Row and The Magnificent Ambersons comes immediately to mind as does Forrest Gump‘s win over any other movie released in 1994, but 1952’s selection, The Greatest Show On Earth, is easily the worst movie to win the biggest award in the movie biz.

I don’t know if this was some sort of lifetime achievement thing for producer/director Cecil B. DeMille (he would direct only one more feature, 1956’s The Ten Commandments) or if the Academy voters were made up of lion tamers, trapeze artists, and clowns, but this movie was more like an infomercial for Ringling Brothers (the opening credits state it was made with Ringling’s cooperation) than an actual movie. At least Jimmy Stewart was smart enough never to appear out of his clown make up, lest he be recognized as having been involved at all. Continue reading “The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)” →

The Colossus of New York (1958)

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The Spensser family is one where the father (William) is a brilliant brain surgeon, one son (Henry) is really good with electronics and the other son (Jeremy) is just an all around genius who works on stuff like frost-resistant crops. Since Jeremy is the one who is getting all the headlines for winning the International Peace Prize, his daddy likes him best and that means he will be the one run over by a truck and need his brain transplanted into a giant mechanical creation of his brother’s. Continue reading “The Colossus of New York (1958)” →

The Best of Everything (1959)

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Despite starring Joan Crawford, Stephen Boyd, and Hope Lange, The Best of Everything manages to spend most of its two hours on exciting stuff like Joan throwing files on people’s desk, making them work late, and watching Lange go from dumb girl who just took the secretary job until her boyfriend gets back from London, to power-hungry wench that doesn’t care about men anymore once she’s jilted, to gal who is sweet on Mike Rice (Boyd), to dumb girl who is going to break up her old boyfriend’s marriage and then realizes that he’s only using her.

She isn’t the only woman that this movie focuses on though. This is a soap opera which means that you have the lives of a bunch of lonely, pathetic women intertwining. And by intertwining, I mean that occasionally they show up for work together and every so often they’ll all be back at their apartment at the same time to mope around about the latest stunt whatever piece of trash they’re dating just pulled. Continue reading “The Best of Everything (1959)” →