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for

October 2000

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Chamber of Horrors
(1940)

Plot: A plucky young woman is threatened by a murderous plot to steal a family fortune.

The mystery novels of Edgar Wallace have inspired enough films to earn him a spot on the most-adapted authors list. His excessively gothic tomes inspired a number of mostly British adaptations in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Perhaps the most famous of these was the Bela Lugosi movie The Human Monster, a.k.a. Dead Eyes of London. An even greater spurt of adaptations emanated from West Germany in the ‘60s. These tended, unsurprisingly, to be rather more baroque and grotesque than the earlier English films, and often starred cult icon Klaus Kinski. Perhaps Allday Entertainment, the fine folks behind the two highly recommended Dr. Mabuse DVDs, will release some of these latter films someday.

Made in England under the more sedate title of The Door with Seven Locks, Chamber of Horrors is basically a murder mystery sporting some outlandish touches. It should be said that if you don’t have much patience for creaky old films, this probably won’t do a lot for you. Yet those who do enjoy such fare will find of merit here. We’ll start with the spirited cast. Leslie Banks, memorable as the crazed Count Zaroff in the classic 1932 version of The Most Dangerous Game, basically plays a riff on that role as the villainous Dr. Manetta. Grievously wounded in World War I, part of Banks’ face was paralyzed, resulting in a memorably sinister look. Our heroine, meanwhile, is portrayed by Lilli Palmer. Forty-five years later, Ms. Palmer would goofily assay the role of Michael Caine’s mother in the execrable The Holcroft Covenant. And let’s not forget the actor who plays our blithe, wisecracking hero Dick Martin, stiff upper lip firmly in place. Amusingly enough for a hero fully in the Bulldog Drummond mold – the film’s director, Norman Lee, had in fact earlier made a Drummond film --- the role is assayed by one Romilly Lunge (!).

We open on the inevitable Dark and Stormy Night. (Yes, even in 1940 this was a tad corny.) The dying Lord Selford is dictating instructions for the disposition of his estate. Since this is adapted from a Wallace novel, these are exceedingly convoluted. Moreover, the instructions are being left with Dr. Manetta. Since audiences of that time would have recognized Banks to be a veteran heavy, Manetta’s incipient villainy would have been a given. Also on hand are Craig, a sinister looking butler sporting a beak of a nose and a hilarious greasy black Shemp toupee, the weasly looking Bevan Cody and his Margaret Hamilton-ish wife Ann. Selford’s estate is to be left to his young son John. Should he pass away, the bequest will pass on to Selford’s distant Canadian relative, June Lansdowne. The main set-up, though, revolves around the family jewels (no, you pervert, real jewels). These are to be sealed in the family tomb behind the, that’s right, Door with Seven Locks. The box containing the heavy iron keys is to be left with the family lawyer, Havelock.

We jump forward ten years. The vivacious June is now living in London with her wacky, man-hungry roommate Glenda. (‘Man-hungry’ being the pre-Sexual Revolution analog to ‘slutty’.) June gets a letter from a Mr. Silva, containing one of the seven keys and warning of a conspiracy against her. She goes to meet him in a nursing home, but he’s inevitably shot to death through a secret panel before he can fully spill the beans. This is, of course, after the two are spied upon through the obligatory portrait-with-removable-eyes. I’m telling you, this movie has it all. June runs out into the hall and finds Ann Cody, dressed as a nurse. When they returned to Silva’s room, though, his body is gone and the bed is made up. (Given the time frame here – roughly twenty seconds -- the only way this would work is if they wheeled in and substituted a second bed through a rather largish secret panel.) Cody tells June that she must have imagined the whole thing, as the hospice is supposedly vacant.

Cut to Scotland Yard. Here we meet the obvious hero of the piece, Dick Martin. He’s just resigned from the CID (Criminal Investigation Department) and is yakking with his former superior, Inspector Sneed. Sneed, like Glenda, is a comic relief second banana. He always seems to be sleeping, in fact he’s borderline narcoleptic, and he looks like Trotsky when he dons his glasses. The reason Dick’s resigned, we learn, is because he’s recently come into an inheritance. That way he can hook up with June at the picture’s conclusion, but without the awkwardness of her being financially better off then he is. I mean, c’mon, this was 1940, after all. (Lest you think I exaggerate, June cavalierly offers to give up her inheritance at film’s climax, so that this won’t be an issue between them.) Anyway, June arrives to report Silva’s death. Dick, already bored with his looming life of ease, offers his services as a private man ‘o action to the comely young woman.

Luckily the movie’s too short to indulge in the thing where the police fail to believe June. Instead, Dick accompanies her and Glenda back to their apartment. Finding a burglar ransacking the women’s improbably gigantic bedroom, they engage in one of those ‘40s fistfights. You know the ones, where every punch is a wild roundhouse sort of deal and the film’s sped up. Dick naturally gets the better of his opponent after they trash most of the room, but a compatriot of the intruder knocks him out from behind. Luckily, however, June had left the key with her landlord, so it remains safe. Dick warns her of the danger she’ll be in if she continues to pursue the matter. Our Heroine remains unperturbed. "When I was fifteen I spun a coin," she explains. "Tails, home girl, cooking and knitting. Heads, adventure. Heads it was!" You go, girl!

The two visits Selford’s lawyer, Havelook, a rather Donald Pleasence-y individual. He explains that Selford’s heir, John, is afflicted with a paralyzed right hand. Due to this he has for some time been touring abroad, on doctor’s orders. Havelock is shocked to see June’s key, as the entire set is supposed to be locked up in the office safe. When the container is brought out, though, they *gasp* find that the keys are missing. The chap in charge of the keys was Foster, who retired some time before. Havelook had been introduced to the fellow by none other than Dr. Manetta, who’s currently renting the Selford manor house. June and Dick head out there to check into things.

I won’t go too much into the remaining plot. Let’s just say that the conspirators don’t take kindly to June’s interference, and that things will get worse for her before they get better.

• Look, June’s carrying on a conversation with Glenda while the latter is scrubbing herself in the bath. Then she stands up behind a towel! Implied nudity! Ha-cha-cha!
• Uhm, isn’t June sitting between the gun and Silva? So how does he end up being shot without she sustaining injury?
• Enlightened wisdom from Insp. Sneed: "Women are like tiger cats. They ought to be caged at sixteen and shot at twenty!" Uh, OK.
• Typical Brit: First thing Dick does after being knocked out is readjust his tie and get his hair in order. I also like how he one-handedly buttoned his suit jacket when he first rushed his opponent. There’s a proper way to do everything, I suppose.
• Cornball Element #27: The fake hazard sign that diverts the main characters’ car onto a potentially fatal byway.
• Watch out! Your toy model car almost drove off that matte painting!
• So Craig the butler is Manetta’s Sinister Mute Henchman? Didn’t Count Zaroff also have one of those in The Most Dangerous Game? Well, it’s a small world, after all.
• Uh, wasn’t Zaroff also a decadent aristocrat driven out of his home country by revolutionaries? Boy, these two would get along great.
• Manetta has a collection of torture instruments, eh? (Shades of Bela Lugosi in The Raven.) And he’s a direct descendant of Torquemada? Oh, brother.
• Manetta’s only companion is his pet monkey Bepo? Oh-Kay.
• Yep, that’s a Door with Seven Locks, all right.
• OK…what? The jewels are to be given to John’s bride when he gets married? So as a precursor to the wedding they’re supposed to go into the tomb and get them? Yeah, that’s jolly.
• Cornball Element #42: The Locked-in-the-Tomb Scene. Ooo, Spoo-ky.
• Listen, that gun might have had a silencer on it earlier. But it doesn’t now, we can see that clearly. So why isn’t it making any noise?
• Hmm, I wonder if we’ll be seeing that Iron Maiden again later in the film.
• Yes, it’s a good hero who runs off for the night and leaves the heroine in the isolated house of the probable villain of the piece. Good job, Dick.
• Oh, now I get it. Bepo’s in the movie so that he can accidentally reveal the location of one of the keys. Well, that’s convenient.
• June wants to avoid phoning Dick from Manetta’s house. I can see her point, but I’m not sure that sneaking out through the secluded, foggy woods is the best way around that.
• I thought they sedated June after they caught her. Plus she appeared to have a concussion. So why’s she so spry?
• When are people going to learn: It’s never a good idea to blackmail a murderer.
• June escapes and then climbs into a passing car without checking to see who’s driving it. Frankly, she deserves whatever she gets after that one.
• Why didn’t the villain’s compatriot, who’s already been captured, warn Craig the butler that Sneed was behind him?
• Manetta’s a pretty obliging villain. First he poisons himself, then he explains the plot before he dies.
• Ha ha, Dick almost ran over those two women walking down the road. What a card!
• Why do I get the feeling that if I started to tug at any of these plot threads, the whole thing would unravel? Well, never mind.

Summation: Fun but old-fashioned and cliché-ridden murder mystery. Won’t be the cup of tea for all viewers. I must say, though, it’s kind of nice to watch a movie in which murder is still considered to be a rather shocking affair, instead of being taken for granted as it is today.

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Giant from the Unknown
(1958)

Plot: The Diablo Giant, a renegade Spanish Conquistador, awakens from suspended animation and goes on a rampage.

Director Richard Cunha churned out four dandy little ‘50s sci-fi turkeys, of which this is clearly the best. Frankenstein’s Daughter, meanwhile, is one of the worst Frankenstein knock-offs, and Missile to the Moon is a remake of the Sonny Tufts classic, Cat-Women of the Moon (!!!). Both of those are wildly entertaining and sure to turn up here someday. The forth, She Demons, I haven’t seen. Based on its pedigree, though, it’s bound to be good. And I’m sure it’ll arrive on DVD presently, as the three prior films have already, as part of the Wade Williams Collection. I already own quite a number of these, including the three Cunha films mentioned. Other titles already available include four Ed Wood titles, Kronos, Teenagers from Outer Space and Jabootu fave The Beast of Yucca Flats. Although generally short on the extras we’ve come to love, each sports incongruously gorgeous transfers.

Pine Ridge, a small mountain community in California, is up in arms about some recent livestock mutilations. Driving the panic is the subsequent brutal murder of a local resident. The townspeople are starting to whisper about on old Indian curse, centered on the area known as Devil’s Crag. They are encouraged in this by the bitter Indian Joe, a destitute native only too happy with the events in question. The town Sheriff does what he can to discourage such talk. Instead, he lays his suspicions on Wayne Brooks, a young scientist living nearby. Brooks was not only known to be feuding with the victim, but shares a longstanding mutual animosity with the Sheriff. He’s warned to stay in town until the killer has been apprehended.

The plot thickens with the appearance of eminent archeologist Prof. Cleveland. He arrives with his (duh) beauteous daughter Janet to search for evidence of a renegade band of conquistadors led by the murderous Vargas, also known as The Diablo Giant. Brooks, of course, offers to show him around the mountains and also makes time with Janet. Before they leave, Cleveland examines some artifacts that Brooks has dug up over the years. The most startling of these is a lizard that Brooks maintains was trapped in a rock for over five hundred years. When the rock was broken open, the lizard sprung out, still alive. Brooks’ theory is that the lizard had been in a state of suspended animation. Cleveland, though, is more interested in pieces of a stone cross. This is evidence, he feels, that the local Indians of five hundred years ago had met Vargas’ troop.

A number of genre pros worked on this modest pleaser. Morris Ankrum plays Prof. Cleveland, a rare role out of uniform for the veteran of such films as The Giant Claw, Kronos, Beginning of the End, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and many more. Lead Edward Kemmer (Wayne Brooks) also played the school teacher hero in Earth vs. the Spider. His wife in that film was played by Sally Fraser, who also portrays Janet, his romantic interest here. Ms. Fraser also appeared in such flicks as It Conquered the World and War of the Colossal Beast. Bob Steele, who assays the Sheriff, was a busy character actor who appeared in Atomic Submarine and a boatload of Westerns. Gary Crutcher’s (Charlie Brown) sole other credits appear in 1972 in the ‘Willard with snakes’ picture Stanley and the following year’s Superchick. How’s that for a career! Lastly, the film’s villain was limned by 6’ 6" wrestler Buddy Baer, brother of the champion heavyweight boxer Max Baer. His most memorable appearance other than this was probably as the Giant in the weird color Abbott & Costello musical fantasy Jack and the Beanstalk.

Two other names of note were involved here. First, the film’s music was composed by Albert Glasser, who scored an immense number of ‘50s sci-fi films. These include Attack of the Puppet People, The Neanderthal Man, Monster from Green Hell, The Cyclops, The Amazing Colossal Man and its sequel; Teenage Caveman and many more. Anyone who worked for Cunha, Bert I. Gordon and Roger Corman is OK in my book. The weirdest name associated with the film, though, is Jack Pierce (!), former head of the makeup department at Universal. There he was the creator of such indelible icons as Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster and Chaney Jr.’s Wolf Man. His work here is rather more modest. Vargas is given gray, dead-looking skin, hair streaked with dirt and sports a long scar on his forehead.

Giant from the Unknown was Cuhna’s first, and again best, movie. A runaway production that shot mostly on location in Big Bear, California (where they unsuccessfully tried to hide from the unions), the film was finished almost exactly two months after they decided to make it. The budget was a paltry $55,000. Their biggest problems included a freak snowstorm during the climatic scene, necessitating some rather unconvincing optical snow effects to be added to shots already in the can, and the fact that the long fight filmed between Brooks and Vargas was ruined when they found that that camera shutter had stuck closed (!!). Having lost a day of shooting, they only had time for a truncated reshoot of the scene.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the movie, though, is how tenuous its claim to being a sci-fi movie is. Sure, Vargas is a conquistador who arises from a five hundred year sleep to terrorize the community. Still, he doesn’t have any preternatural strength or invulnerability or anything. He could just have easily been just a hugely big psychopath and most of the film’s events wouldn’t have been impacted in the least.

Meanwhile, the funniest boner is that we are shown Vargas’ resurrection, and it takes place after the animal mutilations and the murder that have everyone in Pine Ridge riled up. Apparently no one associated with the film noticed this little faux pas.

• I’m constantly flabbergasted at how good these things look on DVD. Even The Beast of Yucca Flats transfer is beautiful. And, if anything, black & white looks even better on disc than color.
• Nice credit sequence, especially the way they scroll up the screen. This is actually fairly fancy and dynamic for this kind of thing.
• I’ve seen plenty of obviously Caucasian actors playing natives in my time, but the fellow cast as Indian Joe is right up there.
• I don’t want to be picky, but why is Vargas known as the ‘Diablo Giant’? I could see either El Diablo Grande or The Devil Giant. But what’s with the half Spanish/half English moniker?
• It’s bad luck to toast with a water glass? I never heard that one.
• Brooks shows the Clevelands his ‘lab.’ The extent of the scientific equipment appears to be a couple of beaker on the lab table, partially filled, that’s right, with a colored liquid. Looking upon this bounty, the Professor notes approvingly, "It’s very complete!" (!!)
• My mistake, he has a mortar and pestle, too, up on that shelf.
• Janet screams and a big blare of dramatic music follows. Why? She opened a box and found *gasp* a small lizard inside. ("He’s quite harmless in there," Brooks explains. Yeah, but for heaven’s sake don’t let it escape, or who knows how many would die?)
• Intuitive Leap Theater Presents:

Brooks: "That ugly little fellow [the lizard] is the leading character in a thesis I’m preparing on the subject of Physical Antiquities."
Cleveland: "Physical Antiquities?! You mean that this animal is related to an extinct species?!"

• "It’s the only one in existence," Brooks avers. OK, Brainiac, how the heck do you know that?
• Hey, if a lizard could survive for centuries in suspended animation, then what about a man?! (Bum bum bum!)
• Janet, were you going to kiss Brooks after the first date? Why, you little slut.
• The location shooting in Big Bear really helps to lend the film some verisimilitude. Too bad many (although not all) of the forest scenes were obviously – and I mean obviously -- shot on a stage. I half expected the actors to point off-camera while we cut to some stock footage of elephants fording a river.
• Janet serves the men coffee!
• So that Jimmy Olsen-esque gawky teenager is named *snort* Charlie Brown? (Jabootu Trivia: What’s the other bad sci-fi movie featuring a character named Charlie Brown.) And his constant cries of "Jeepers!" only add to the humor.
• Janet asks what she should do while the men folk search for relics. "Well, since you’ve made the beds," her father observes (in the tents?), "you can wash the dishes and tidy up camp." Brooks tosses in his two cents. "And then start lunch. And plenty of it!" Ah, the ‘50s.
• The animated gird overlay of the mapped-out area they’re searching is a nice touch.
• Janet serves the men coffee, again!
• The first thing Janet does when she gets tired of fooling around with the metal detector? She sits on a log and fixes up her face with her pocket compact (!!).
• So the artifacts are found when Janet mistakenly goes in the wrong direction -- just like a girl! -- and then leaves her compact behind. And just when Cleveland and Brooks were about to give up the search. Gee, haven’t seen anything like that before.
• Holy crap, do metal detectors really make that much noise?
• Janet’s gone out in the field with her father for three years and is still started when an ancient skull is unearthed? I mean, it’s not like we’re talking a small lizard in a box, here.
• If Vargas was recently released from a layer of rock (like the lizard) by an electrical storm, why is he now all covered with soil and leaves and stuff?
• Boy, not only was Vargas preserved for five hundred years, but so were his pants and tunic.
• Is Vargas being alive really the first theory they would formulate after finding his armor but no bones?
• Janet and Brooks go out for a romantic walk in the *cough* woods. They stop before a large wall photograph of a moonlit lake for a little smooching. When employing the photo backdrop idea, though, here’s a hint: Don’t take such a picture when it’s breezy. The ‘lake’ here sports an oddly permanent ripple pattern. This becomes rather noticeable after, oh, three or four minutes.
• Vargas leers at Janet’s shadow, cast upon the tent wall as she undresses. I have to assume that it’s on purpose that you can see the outline of both of her breasts (Bill Warren’s essential tome Keep Watching the Skies reports that actress Fraser wore pasties for this bit). This all must have seen rather provocative for the time, especially with the monstrous and degenerate Vargas lurking nearby.
• Janet grabs her revolver in a panic and, as Andy Borntreger would write: RANDOM ACT OF GRATUITOUS VIOLENCE AGAINST A COT!
• Ann Brown, Charlie’s sister (isn’t that Sally?), tells him to go on to work. She’ll be OK, she’s got their father’s rifle at hand. Then she wanders over to the well unarmed. Du-uh.
• I don’t even want to think about what was supposed to happen between Vargas capturing Ann and his killing her. Yuck.
• So your theory is that tannic acid in the ground here works as a preservative? Science!
• Time-wasting subplot seven: The Sheriff arrests Brooks for Ann’s murder, even though two witnesses state he never left the camp.
• If Brooks believes that Vargas is alive (and has stolen his armor back from them), then why would he ask the sheriff to stop by Indian Joe’s cabin to look for evidence? Once they got there and didn’t find anything wouldn’t the Sheriff just be more pissed off than before? Unless it’s just to find something spooky to show the audience…
• There hang’s Injun Joe, he’s movin’ kind of slow. Actually, he’s not movin’ at all.
• Cleveland disappears and Janet goes to look for him, instead finding Vargas. Gee, too bad neither of them thought to carry one of their guns with them, given the whole, you know, homicidal giant guy thing.
• Knocked out Dad, attractive daughter, horny preserved ancient giant…Good gravy, they totally ripped-this movie off in Eegah!
• Watch that foam rubber ‘boulder’ wiggle when Janet leans against it. Hee hee hee.
• Boy, those cars just never start when you need ‘em to, do they?
• Yeah, leave your suspect in the police cruiser with the keys in the ignition. Nice work, Brainiac.
• The inevitable car chase, and…watch out! A balsa wood fence!
• Yep, if those guys scrunch up real tight as they cruise through the fence, we’ll never be able to tell they’re stuntmen.
• Yes, the chase was exciting and all -- well, not really, but I appreciate the effort --, yet wasn’t it unnecessary? I mean, Cleveland had seen Vargas grab Janet. So why not just tell the Sheriff and get the nearby posse going instead of driving off and getting shot at? (Well, OK, so the Hero could courageously head off after Janet on his own. Check.)
• You know, earlier the Sheriff looked like a jerk for accusing Brooks without any evidence. Still, his "I read this thing all wrong" apology is rather goofily worded. "Sorry, Brooks. I never even stopped to consider the possibility that a resurrected five hundred year-old gigantic conquistador was responsible for these crimes. I guess I was just blinded by our mutual dislike."
• Charlie is left behind and told to guard the campsite. "I’ll guard the camp with my life!" he replies. Make sure you do, Charlie. If Vargas ever got his hands on those canvas tents, folding chairs and that coffee pot…well, I don’t even like thinking about it.
• Should the posse really track through all that heavy brush with those lit flares? (It does look kind of neat, though.)
• Look, I wouldn’t want a big giant guy tossing large rocks at my head. I’m just saying that it doesn’t look all that impressive on the screen, is all.
• Oh, c’mon, he’d be Swiss cheese by now.
• Yeah, sneak up behind the wounded Vargas and then hit him with your rifle. I guess this guy just isn’t up on the whole ‘gun’ concept.
• One of the drawbacks of a crystal-clear digital picture is that things like the piano wires attached to that guy really are obvious. This rather diminished our surprise when Vargas picked him up over his head. The character, though, was so surprised that he then turned into a dummy.
• I know you don’t want Charlie trailing along with you, Brooks, but you don’t have to be such a prick about it. "And try to forget her [your just recently slain and no doubt brutally sexually assaulted dead sister] for the time being." Words of wisdom, my friend.
• Of course, no one keeps an eye on the kid (in a roughly twenty by twenty foot campsite), and he sneaks away to reap himself some justice. As he’s not the hero, I think you can imagine how successful he is.
• They hear shots and instantly assume it’s Charlie. What about they sentry they left behind? And why is no one else in the camp bothering to react to the shots?
• There’s Charlie on the ground, all beat up. Better move his spine around a lot.
• Now it’s snowing, now it’s not. Now it’s snowing…
• Uh, didn’t Vargas drop that axe in the woods earlier?
• Here comes the Sheriff. Yeah, just stand there and watch Brooks take the guy on with a stick, ya maroon. Don’t draw your weapon and help out or anything.
• What’s worse, the semi-transparent matte shot of Vargas as he falls over a dam into the waters below, or the semi-transparent matte shot of Glenn Manning in The Amazing Colossal Man as he falls over a dam into the waters below. You decide.

• To be fair, though, even knowing that the cascading waters were matted in (as mentioned in Keep Watching the Skies), I still can hardly tell.
• If Vargas smashed through that railing when he fell, how comes it’s noticeably whole in the next shot?
• One reason these old sci-fi mellers work better than more recent ones was their often abbreviated running times. This one runs under eighty minutes. Tack another twenty minutes on this and we’re talking Boredom City.

Summation: A decent ‘50s sci-fi flick with a fairly unique premise. DVD includes the typically bombastic trailer and some informative liner notes by genre pro Tom Weaver.

___________________________________________________________________

Space Thing
(1967)

Plot: A guy with a lot of back hair reads from Sci-Fi magazines and then dreams of being on a spaceship mission featuring a lot of soft-core sex.

I’m a little fearful of reviewing this right after last month’s Nude on the Moon. I don’t want to foster the impression that I spend a lot of time watching this stuff. Having now watched a few such pictures, I think I can safely say I won’t become addicted to the genre. However, it must be admitted that the Something Weird video company does some of the best DVDs on the market. Here we get the film, a commentary track with SW head Mike Vraney and the flick’s original producer, smutmaven David. F. Freidman, as well as two amusing non-sex related shorts. A gallery of advertising inserts is also included. I wish these guys were in charge of the ever-growing collection of discs in the Wade Williams collection (see above).

According to the disc’s commentary track, Space Thing is one of SW’s best sellers. This is unsurprising. As ‘sex’ films, the pictures produced by Dave Friedman now seem rather tame. (Although often much seamier than most modern porn.) Certainly you can see much more explicit fake sex any Friday night on cable. Yet the film has much going for it in terms of whatever nerds and geeks make up the market for these things. First, it functions as a parody of the bad sci-fi films of the previous decade. Moreover, it serves as an overt riff on what James T. Kirk was presumably up to with those space women on Star Trek every week. Finally, the flick is, as the commentary notes, pretty hilariously bad stuff. "If this wasn’t a little crotchy," Vraney notes, "this would be the most famous ‘worst science fiction movie’ of all time." Personally, I think that’s a bit much. Still, it can be pretty amusing, although the recurrent pausing for unerotic sex sequences works to diminish this aspect. These bits work for me though. They give me an excuse to check over my e-mail while waiting for the ‘action’ to end.

We meet our protagonist in a opening bit of filler material. He’s shown lying in bed and reading sci-fi magazines while his annoyed wife/girlfriend/whatever tries to entice him into a little action. This is ‘funny.’ Being the kind of movie it is, he does eventually succumb to her, shall we say, surgically enhanced charms. This prolog, unconnected from the rest of the film, was apparently added so as to stretch out the film’s running time to a robust seventy minutes.

We eventually cut to what is presumably meant to be the guy’s dream. He’s the captain of a spaceship, represented by a badly lit and slightly modified model kit of the USS Enterprise hanging from a string. In a touch that goes nowhere, we learn that he’s been marooned by mutineers. He manages to drift by a Terranian vessel, itself the model kit from the old Invaders TV show. If I’m following this, the Alien guy is the hero and the Earth people are the villains. Here we cut to the hilarious title credits, written in the Goldie Hawn Laugh-In style with Day-Glo paints on a woman’s body. Although we see rather more of this body than we did of Goldie’s. Back inside the, uh, economically envisioned starship, Our Hero comes aboard in human guise. He introduces himself as Col. James Granilla (or something), and is met by the ship’s cruel and barely clothed Captain Mother. "A female Captain!" He narrates in surprise. "The Terranians are even odder than I thought!"

So we go, as Granilla tries to sabotage the ship while learning of this strange human thing called Sex. "I knew now," he narrates, "that in order for my disguise to be proper, I would have to learn their intimate ways. A disgusting thought." He’ll be aided in this endeavor by his race’s innate ability to turn invisible. Various couplings (sorta) occur until he gets the chance to blow up the ship and massacre everyone with a bomb. It’s the Feel Good Movie of the Year!

• Nude girl, sporting tons of make-up, and guy in underwear. Check.
• Jazz score, sometimes bad and sometimes good. Check.
• Yuck, way too much back hair on that guy. And the extreme close-up of the woman tonguing his hairy chest? That I could have done without.
• Ah, the asteroid field featuring hunks of papier-mâché rocks hanging on strings. (Actually, the commentary says they were cotton.) A classic.
• It’s the year 2069. I get it. How droll.
• Your escape pod is called a ‘space canoe’? That’s a new one on me.
• Why are they blowing talcum powder on that *cough* spaceship? Is that supposed to be ‘space dust’ or something?
• I’m assuming from the various naked female buns on display throughout the film that the ‘health club’ idea hadn’t really caught on yet.
• Actors’ names on display: April Playmate, Mercy Mee, Ronnie Runningboard (!), Fancher Fague, Legs Benedict (!!) and Stan Isfloride. Meanwhile, the camera is manned by Sy Klops, Allus Dropsit is the Key Grip and the script is by Cosmo Politan.
• OK, so the guy’s uniforms are blue stretch pajamas. Still, do we need so much Plumber’s Crevasse here?
• Granilla’s cover story is that he’s from Kansas, eh? Har har.
• The ladies’ spaceship uniforms really don’t seem very practical.
• Awesome special effects. Granilla turns invisible by turning off the camera and turning it back on once he’s moved out of shot. Take that, ILM!!
• It’s not only a round bed, it’s a Space Round Bed!
• Time to check my e-mail.
• Sheesh, that guy’s got a hairy back, too. Buy a razor, for Pete’s sake. And shouldn’t you be taking your pants off at some point?
• What kind of ‘latrine duty’ is there on a spaceship?
• "Ignite Retrograde Rockets!" Yep, somebody did their homework here.
• Captain Mother prefers the chicks, eh? Well, that figures.
• Spaceship navigation panels are built out of plywood? Oh, I’m sorry, Space Plywood.
• Hey, Dick Van Patten!
• Hmm, a flagellation scene. There’s a paper to be written on how porn in less sexually open societies (see the underground ‘erotica’ of Victorian England, for instance) often features spankings and whippings, while the mainstreaming of sex media tends to homogenize such kinky elements out.
• Wait a minute, she’s not cut and bleeding, there’s just red paint on the whip. (Which explains why the whip stops ‘cutting’ her after a while.)
• Dude, pull up your pajama bottoms!

• Space Scuba Tanks!
• I hope I’ve gotten some more e-mail in the last ten minutes.
• So a fully clothed man making out with a naked woman constituted dirty movies back in the ‘60s?
• Boy, those Space Chairs look like upside-down plastic garbage cans.
• Yikes! That woman is definitely cruising for some skin cancer. Stay out of the sun, I’m telling ya!
• Ah, the old "Food Pills’’ gag.
• Hmm, it was dark when they landed, but now the sun’s out on this ‘asteroid.’
• Yeah, putting the toy spaceship they’re using in the foreground of the shot really makes it look ‘big.’ Not.
• Here’s a tip when on an Away Mission on rocky terrain. Bring a blanket so as to facilitate sex.
• NOO! Keep that woman inside the ship! Don’t let her back out into the sunlight! You know, I think I can actually see her skin turning to leather.
• Out of e-mail. Well, that’s what the fast forward button on your remote control is for.
• Ha! Dick Van Patten can’t get any!
• Shouldn’t you be taking off your pa…oh, never mind.
• Wow, they use the same special effect technique for a guy getting disintegrated as when someone turns invisible.
• Dude, I know you’ve been trying to destroy the ship, but you’ve got a disintegration pistol now and only there’s only five crewmembers left. And one of them’s Dick Van Patten. Go to town!
• How did they get off the asteroid? "As luck would have it," Granilla explains, "Captain Mother remembered the ship had another reserve fuel supply." Well, that explains why she’s the captain, I guess.
• This is probably the first movie to feature a guy who destroyed a ship and killed everyone because he feared trying to satisfy four sex-hungry women. Somehow I can’t see Captain Kirk going out like this.
• So "micro atomic bombs" are "deadly destructive when activated," eh? And you light them with a match? Well, that’s The Future for you.
• Shouldn’t the words "The End" be written on that woman’s butt cheeks rather than her hands?

Extras:

• As usual, the four-minute (!) preview is in many ways better than the movie. It’s also full of the de rigueur smutty puns involving scenes in "the cockpit" and the like. "It’s the Planet of the Rapes!"
• Roll-Oh the Robot is a hilarious black & white three minute short from the ‘40s or ‘50s. It chronicles the adventures of an Ozzie & Harriet-esque woman who has a typically goofy and cumbersome robot. Said automaton is activated with a panel featuring oddly specific buttons like Answer Door, Wash Dishes, Make Bed, Fix Furnace and, my favorite, Get Hat. I don’t know, if I only had eight buttons I might have made different choices. It’s an amazing Glimpse into The Future!
• The Dance of Tomorrow is one of those insanely expensive-looking Industrial Shorts they used to feature on MST3K. Made somewhere in the mid-to-late ‘50s, I’d think, and lasting four and a half minutes. This one is a color musical subject introducing various futuristic concept cars at an auto show. The presenters have been furnished with designer togs to match each car. A man identifies the car, a woman the clothes. "A magnificent El Dorado Town Car by Cadillac!" "Ensemble by Christian Dior of Paris!" The best is a Firebird 2 which looks like the Batmobile. They end up driving it in a model town that looks out of Logan’s Run. This thing is simply demented. We could actually use a whole DVD of such material. Listening, Something Weird?
• Us usual, the gallery of advertising stuff is cool, but SW discs still don’t allow you to pause (or speed up or slow down) as they flash by so that you can give them a better look. When are they going to fix this? Everybody complains about it. There’s six and a half minutes (!) of this.

The Commentary:

• Obviously, the commentary with the gregarious Mr. Friedman is the highlight there. How many of the anecdotes are strictly true is left for us to decide, but tidbits like the film’s star Steve Vincent (i.e., Steve Stunning) being trained as an "opera star" are pretty amusing. A good tour of low-budget sexploitation filmmaking.
• "We could show beaver," Friedman explains, "but not pickles."
• The Dick Van Patten guy (Ronny Runningboard, nee Dan Martin) was, in actuality, a Los Angeles county Deputy Sheriff (!).
• "He really wanted to be in movies in the worst way. And he was!" Rimshot, please.
• Carla Peterson plays Captain Mother, and was Vincent’s ladyfriend.
• Mercy Mantello, the chick who gets whipped, was used as a model by David "The Rocketeer" Stevens, who went on to do the artwork for SW’s Space Thing video release.
• Friedman explains that the comical names in the credits also kept the actors from becoming ‘known’ to their audience. Because, of course, if any of them became ‘names,’ they could then demand more money. This did eventually occur in the hardcore porn business, as they note.
• Shot in 35mm color, the film’s budget, Friedman thinks, was seventeen to eighteen thousand dollars.
• Vraney asks about the obligatory lesbian scene, prompting the bizarre analogy that "All of my films…were very rigid in their construction. Almost like a medieval morality play." Then he reveals one of the most closely held secrets of the sexploitation field. It turns out that such sequences weren’t meant for the ladies in the audience, but rather for the men, many of who apparently enjoy watching two women going at it. Call the papers.
• Some especially interesting material deals with the actual business end of the film. Friedman, obviously not a sci-fi fan, thought the film was awful -- he’s still obviously embarrassed by it -- and would tank. He evens reports that he was unsure whether to release it or not. However, unsurprisingly to us genre fans, I’m sure, the film made major money on the grinder market, especially on California’s plush Pussycat Circuit. Friedman was amazed when he learned that the Pussycat theaters planned to hold the film over.
• The money we’re talking here seems amazing. With prints and advertising, Friedman estimates that Space Thing cost somewhere under thirty thousand to get to market. Meanwhile, the first run just at the Pussycat theaters would bring in somewhere in the area of $45,000. That was before it showed anywhere else in the state of California, much less throughout the country.
• Friedman goes into a long story about a fellow he had to fire from the movie. It’s pretty impressive that he still seems to regret firing a guy thirty years earlier, or remembers so much detail about working with the guy.
• Even after Space Thing had continued to run for years in theaters, Friedman still loathed it. When Vraney first made his deal with Friedman to take his old negatives and sell tapes of them through the Something Weird label, he found a dusty copy of the film and inquired about it. From the title he was hoping it was a sci-fi picture, which he knew would sell well. "Kid," Friedman supposedly replied, "you don’t want that movie! That’s the absolutely worst thing I ever put out!" Again, this remained a SW bestseller for years, and undoubtedly remains so, given its DVD release.

Summation: Plenty of yucks and some funny featurettes, as well as the interesting commentary track.

-by Ken Begg