Time was, this country was one great big expansive opportunity to do whatever a person wanted to. There weren’t any rules and quotas set up by feminists, liberals, and activist judges because Big Government knew what was best for you. You needed to drive all over the upper Midwest during the summer to sell real estate and leave your kid at home by himself? Knock yourself out, bub! Just make sure you bring a big ass turkey home for Thanksgiving! Continue reading “Rascal (1969)”
Category: 1960s
Horrors of Spider Island (1960)
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.
Beach Blanket Bingo (1965)
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)”
Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962)
With Journey to the Seventh Planet, we are in the far flung past of 2001 where everything is just peachy now that the United Nations runs the world. So now that this socialist paradise has finally been forced upon us, what do they squander all our precious resources on? A manned mission to explore Uranus!
Studiously avoiding all the rectal humor such a movie inevitably provides (everyone seems to conscientiously pronounce the seventh planet as You-Ron-Us), the idea that we would need to send a spaceship out there to check for life is only slightly less ridiculous than the idea that we would send a crew made up of ugly Scandinavians and an aging John Agar who doesn’t seem to really believe that he got tricked into appearing in this. Continue reading “Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962)”
For the Love of Willadean (1964)
After watching For the Love of Willadean, I’m reasonably confident that even now, decades later, that J.D. Gray is still a virgin.
J.D. was of course the country hick who pined away for the girl next door, Willadean. Though he would no doubt chalk up his inability to even get a whiff of Willadean to the unfair competition provided by the city slicker who just moved into the neighborhood, an impartial observer would surely have no choice, but to lay the blame squarely at J.D.’s watermelon-stained feet. Continue reading “For the Love of Willadean (1964)”
Kerim, Son of the Sheik (1962)
If you love guys riding around the desert on horses with their scimitars in the air, this Italian sword and sandal epic with a Middle Eastern paint job will surely put a minaret in your thwab!
There’s stampedes to maraud and burn an oasis, there’s messengers bringing tragic news from afar, there’s ambushes, counter-ambushes, attacks on a desert palace (as well as a retreat when the dang palace gate gets closed), and most pleasingly of all, riding around for some nice hot dusty vengeance by a pumped up dude decked out in an Arabian ninja costume! Continue reading “Kerim, Son of the Sheik (1962)”
The Wonderful Land of Oz (1969)
Barry Mahon was a prolific filmmaker, oddly vacillating his directing chores between cheap sex movies like Fanny Hill Meets The Red Baron and Run Swinger Run! and cheap kiddie flicks like Jack And The Beanstalk (also on this DVD from Something Weird), and Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny. This two pronged approach Barry took to his career puts us in the unfortunate position of not knowing exactly what his movie The Girl With The Magic Box is about. With The Wonderful Land of Oz though, Barry is clearly aiming at the cut-rate kiddie matinee market, but manages only to hit his poor son Channy Mahon. Continue reading “The Wonderful Land of Oz (1969)”