Category: 1970s

Frogs (1972)

~ monsterhunter ~ Leave a comment

I’ve always considered Ray Milland’s less glamorous work in movies like Panic In Year Zero, X – The Man With The X-Ray Eyes, and Frogs much more important than roles like the Oscar-winning turn he did as a boozehound in The Lost Weekend. So many of our most beloved actors (and even more so, our hottest actresses) fade into obscurity and therefore into taxpayer-funded nursing homes once they hit their late thirties and start looking all wrinkly.

Ray though didn’t give a crap if a part simply required him to sit in a wheelchair, casting irritated glances at large quantities of fat frogs as in this film or even more amazingly, appear with Don Rickles when Ray had his x-ray eyes. If he was breathing, he was working. (Check his filmography – the credits run from 1929-1985. He died in 1986.) Continue reading “Frogs (1972)” →

The Food of the Gods (1976)

~ monsterhunter ~ Leave a comment

Morgan’s grandpa always told Morgan that one day the Earth would rebel against Man for taking a big dump all over the land. Nature would surely exact its revenge against humanity because this was the 1970s and “nature run amok” movies about hoards of rabbits (Night of the Lepus), plagues of frogs (Frogs) and outbreaks of William Shatner (Kingdom of the Spiders) were all the rage.

You know what Morgan’s crazy old grandpappy forgot when terrorizing Morgan with his left wing hippie eco-terror tales? That Nature may be pissed, but none of that matters when the giant rats, wasps and chickens attack a professional football player! Who gives a crap about a rat the size of a Volkswagen when you’re facing off against a psychotic 350 pound lineman every Sunday? Continue reading “The Food of the Gods (1976)” →

Mr. Superinvisible (1970)

~ monsterhunter ~ Leave a comment

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)

~ monsterhunter ~ 3 Comments

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)” →

The Deep (1977)

~ monsterhunter ~ Leave a comment

The Deep is a movie long on scenes of Nick Nolte and Robert Shaw vacuuming up the ocean floor in search of Spanish treasure and short on anything resembling excitement. The movie has also been “credited” with starting the wet T-shirt craze with scenes of Jacqueline Bisset diving around in a clingy top, but once she gets relegated to bored girlfriend status and just hangs out on the boat while Nick and Robert battle Lou Gossett and a big eel, the movie loses whatever momentum it had.

Nolte and Bisset play a dumb couple down in Bermuda on some sort of adventure vacation where they go diving around wrecks in the hopes of finding some valuable doodads or other. After finding one such knick knack, they’re approached by Lou who claims to be a bottle collector and is interested in buying this piece of glass they found. Continue reading “The Deep (1977)” →

The Great Alligator (1979)

~ monsterhunter ~ Leave a comment

Director Sergio Martino is an old hand at these types of movies (Italian trash), having been behind 2019: After The Fall Of New York and Mountain Of The Cannibal God as well as forays into the giallo, spaghetti western, and Eurocrime arenas. And having worked extensively with the likes of Daniel Greene in flicks like After the Condor and Beyond Kilimanjaro, Across the River of Blood, if anyone could take a plastic alligator named Kruna and make an entertaining film out of it, it would be Sergio. Continue reading “The Great Alligator (1979)” →

The Betsy (1978)

~ monsterhunter ~ Leave a comment

I’m going to go out on a limb here and hazard a guess that Sir Laurence Olivier didn’t receive his knighthood for his scene in this movie where he got all turned on by watching his daughter-in-law nursing his grandson and ended up bedding her down at the conclusion of a ten o’clock feeding that left the audience sick to its stomach.

Whether this is the single worst scene of this movie is open to debate since the movie is strewn with them, but it has to be the most memorably tacky of them.

Sir Larry wouldn’t be the only guy to trade on his reputation as a film legend to pick up movie welfare later in life (paging Sir Richard Burton!), but surely there was some other big budget flop being made in the late 1970s that didn’t involve him attempting to play both an old coot and his younger self in flashback. Watching him with his absurdly dyed hair as we traveled down mammary lane with him to the 1930s only made us wish that we could go back to 1975 where a pasty-faced up and comer named Tommy Lee Jones took center stage. Continue reading “The Betsy (1978)” →