(aka, Monster From The Surf, Surf Terror) Back in the Sixties, there was a long string of Beach movies, most of them turned out by AIP, including all those Frankie and Annette films. This isn’t one of them. There were also a number of teen monster movies, starting in the late Fifties with I […]
Read more "THE BEACH GIRLS AND THE MONSTER (1965)"This is probably my all time favorite Godzilla Movie. Not the best, mind you, but the most insane and totally whacked out Godzilla movie ever made. First of all, it has everything. And I do mean “everything:” flying saucers, cute pets, time travel, the secret origins of both monsters, a terminator robot, a super submarine […]
Read more "Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah [Gojira vs. Kingu Gidorâ] (1991)"It was one of those rare, surprise successes. But could it be repeated? In 1953, BBC staff scriptwriter, Nigel Kneale, convinced the Beeb to let him write a SF/horror play to fill an empty Saturday night slot. It was a huge success, drawing a record audience, and inspired their competitors to make their own SF […]
Read more "Quatermass II (1955)"Bert I. Gordon seemed to specialize in making things big. In fact, most of his contributions to the world of low budget horror and SF seem to involve photographically blowing something up to giant size, whether insects or people or animals of one sort or another, In fact, his first Seven movies — every one he […]
Read more "The Food of the Gods (1976)"(aka, Jules Verne’s ‘Mystery on Monster Island’; Monster Island) The theory here is that this one is based on Jules Verne‘s Mysterious Island. As I’ve noted before, there seems to be no real connection between a Jules Verne movie and anything he actually wrote. But even by that standard, this one has remarkably little to […]
Read more "Mystery on Monster Island [Misterio en la isla de los monstruos] (1981)"It seems strange, but one of the seminal SF film and TV series remains little seen in the United States. I refer, of course, to the original Quatermass serials and the Hammer film remakes that followed. While he had minimal impact on American SF movies, Quatermass inspired a generation of British SF movies and television […]
Read more "The Uninvited (1997)"(Warning: Mild Spoilers) Tim Holt is best remembered as a Cowboy star (and, curiously, as the son of Cowboy star Jack Holt). it really comes as no surprise to find him in the lead in a Fifties monster movie because those films tended to feature the sort of second string stars who could just as […]
Read more "The Monster That Challenged the World (1957)"