There are films that live on in legend because whatever else they might be, they're mostly prominent embarrassments in the career of someone eminently recognisable. I'm not talking about the direction John Carradine's career went as it dragged on way down into the depths, but about things like Trog with Joan Crawford, Teenage Caveman with Robert Vaughan and Eegah with Richard Kiel, three films that coincidentally share a theme. Yes, Richard Kiel is a 7'2" apparently ageless prehistoric giant caveman, which might have seemed a step up at the time from being merely a bouncer in a night club, but may well have been a little too prominent for comfort when he put on his steel teeth and started duking it out with James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me fifteen years later.
Back in the silent era William Beaudine was a name to be reckoned with. His acting career took off in 1909 but he soon became far better known behind the camera, beginning as an assistant director in 1911 at a mere nineteen years of age and progressing quickly up to full director four years and 55 films later. He made it as high as Mary Pickford movies like Little Annie Rooney and Sparrows before making four films in England and somehow alienating Hollywood. So he became 'One Shot' William Beaudine, churning out movies at a rapid pace for Poverty Row studios like Monogram and PRC, often without retakes. He racked up hundreds of these, some shot in less than a week, and while they were often capable, even astounding if you consider the budgets and the shooting schedules, they still weren't very good. This eight day shoot was his last film, shot back to back with another weird western, Billy the Kid Versus Dracula, which is even worse than this.
Strangely he hadn't made too many crossover movies before, with the stunning exception of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla in 1952, but he seems to have taken the genre clash as a ideal setup for dry comedy and so played it straight but outrageous. This approach leaves it akin to a TV sitcom with the laugh track removed, unashamedly camp and ripe to be converted into yet another stage musical like Reefer Madness and The Evil Dead. You can imagine what's going to come from the title alone but the standard western town being emptied of inhabitants while the credits roll underlines the atmosphere of fear. Just in case you've been living under a rock for the rest of your life, there's a frickin' huge painted mission sitting atop the frickin' huge painted hill that looms behind the town like the frickin' huge painted backdrop it is. One Shot hadn't had a budget since the advent of sound. Anyway, take a wild stab as to where the Frankensteins live.
Guess why everyone's getting the hell out of Dodge. Yes, they're Frankensteins. C'mon, work with me here. They're Dr Maria Frankenstein, who is the granddaughter of the Count, because even the title of this film is wrong, and her rather elderly brother, Dr Rudolph Frankenstein. She's actually not too bad, because she's played by Narda Onyx, with bright eyes, rosy cheeks and a perfect accent for a Frankenstein. Onyx was Estonian but was born in 1931 so soon became a refugee bouncing around during the war looking for a home. Her accent is exotic because it's a potent combination of Estonian, German, English, Swedish and Canadian, with an emphasis on rolling Rs. The influences are obvious: she's the Bela Lugosi to Stephen Geray's Peter Lorre. Geray was born in Austria-Hungary in a town that is now in the Ukraine, but as Rudolph he's 27 years older than his screen sister, almost double her age but still dominated by her character.
The inevitable question is, 'What are they doing in some western town?' The inevitable answer is more of the usual. 'Another wonderful storm!' cries Dr Maria Frankenstein as we first meet her, for that's what the deserts of the American southwest have in common with the old gothic tales of old Europe: electrical storms. Other than the location, the Frankensteins look the part. They have white lab coats and an anatomic chart on the wall. They have a laboratory full of scientific gadgets that spark and light up. They have a young man strapped to a table with a steel helmet on his head painted in the colours of the Jamaican flag. For this, there is no explanation. I was waiting for the film to become Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter and Her Sidekick, Bob Marley, but it never manifested, mon. Maria is following in the footsteps of her grandfather (we discover that her father was just a weakling) in trying to resuscitate brains and animate corpses.
Unfortunately she's not too good at it. Francisco Lopez promptly proves to be yet another failure by rudely dying on her table, though we see what Maria doesn't and realise that he dies because Rudolph deliberately substitutes poison from a bottle with a huge skull and crossbones on it for the digitalis that his sister needed to save his life. He obviously wasn't kidding when he said he really wants to go back to Vienna. Maybe a little child murder will help make his dreams come true. Maria is too busy to notice though, so she thrusts her fist into her palm and goes back to the encyclopaedia, I mean to grandfather's notes. 'What a fool I've been!' she cries. She's made fundamental errors with the duothermic impulsator, the fool, by only attaching it to the corpse at hand, rather than the brain of a living body too. Bizarrely she can turn to her well bookmarked 'Precisely What You're Doing Wrong' chapter to find out precisely what she's doing wrong.
Rudolph may have known all along because he points out that it might kill the living brain, but that's just a cue for Maria to glow insanely. She's magnanimous about it: 'That's a chance I am willing to take,' she cries. She needs a powerful giant not a child, then she's bound to succeed. 'But what good will it be to succeed?' cues Rudolph. 'Imagine!' she replies. 'We'd have someone to do our bidding who can't be put to death. Just as we have given it life, only we can take its life away.' In other words, she's an even crazier loon than the rest of her family and we can't help but wonder how these Frankensteins keep surviving long enough to breed and who they keep finding to help. Maybe Rudolph is really the same age as his sister but inbreeding took its toll. Maybe he doesn't have teeth and that explains why he has so much trouble saying simple things like 'three children'. That's how many have died thus far from the next door village.
Francisco Lopez makes four, but he's special because he has an annoying sister who can happily remain annoying throughout the film as its other leading lady. It's because of her that the Lopez family is the last one left in the village, getting drunk on orange juice while they wait for Juanita to return from the house. She's played by Estelita Rodriguez, credited as usual simply as Estelita and who may just be the biggest star of the film, given that she came to it from the classic John Ford western Rio Bravo. Star or not, she's still annoying. She's the stereotypical spitfire senorita with her bright red shirt and bright blue dress, full of piss and vinegar and lathered with far too much make up. She's at the house to ask questions about Francisco, who is apparently suffering from a contagious disease, the very one that apparently caused the death of the previous three children and which apparently required them to be buried at night with nobody around.
Perhaps she was happy to play stereotypical Mexicans because she wasn't one: she was born in Cuba, at least a decade before the year of birth listed on her tombstone. If she was only 35 when she made this film, she'd been doing a lot of hard living, though that may also explain why she died before it could be released, officially of influenza but more probably of something a little more suspicious. She was far from the only person to end her career here, this film being something of a jinx for the cast and crew. Beyond being the last film for William Beaudine and Estelita, Narda Onyx never acted again, going on to write a biography of Johnny Weissmuller instead. Stephen Geray had only a single further credit, a minor one in 1966 as Man with Fish in The Swinger. Cal Bolder switched to TV and retired a couple of years later. Of the main stars, only John Lupton and Jim Davis went on to long careers.
Lupton, Bolder and Davis belong to the other half of this film, and the two halves haven't met thus far. Lupton is the suitably black clad and moustachioed Jesse James, who has mysteriously survived the Northridge raid but has found himself on the run ever since. Bolder plays his one remaining sidekick, a musclebound but apparently mildly retarded character called Hank Tracy. The pair have fallen as low as to have Hank boxing in impromptu prizefights in each town they find themselves in just to put food on the table, girlie ones too if this one is anything to go by, with a Tracy on one side, a Stacy on the other, and a Jesse collecting the bet money after the fact. At least One Shot Beaudine manages to sneak some interesting shots in, such as the one where Stacy punches Tracy into a horse so that its rider falls off. Are we clutching at straws so much that such a setup is a highlight? You betcha.
Jesse James is in town to meet up with the Wild Bunch, which has been similarly depleted down from a dozen to three because Circle Productions couldn't afford a large cast. Butch Curry is their leader and all he has left to lead is his brother Lonny and Pete Ketchum, yet they're still at each other's throats. Butch wants to pull a daring heist, to capture $100,000 of bank money from a stagecoach in a pass outside of Bisbee, but he doesn't think three members of the Wild Bunch is enough to take this much money from the one man who will apparently be on the stage with it, so calls in a notorious outlaw with a price on his head. That's a phrase that's continually used throughout the movie, by the way, like it's his actual name. Jesse James, Notorious Outlaw With a Price on His Head. Maybe he went native and the local tribe were feeling verbose. Lonny turns traitor when he can't get a third of the take and runs to Marshal MacPhee, played by J R Ewing's father, the reliable Jim Davis.
Bizarrely, Rayford Barnes, who plays Lonny and inadvertently causes the entire Wild Bunch to be shot dead by the law, would follow this role up with one in The Wild Bunch, the renowned one directed by Sam Peckinpah, albeit not in a major role. I wonder if Peckinpah was exhibiting a subtle sense of humour in the casting choice. Six years earlier Barnes had also appeared in a movie called Young Jesse James, but then everyone working in Hollywood seemed to make at least one Jesse James picture during their career. The stagecoach heist doesn't go well, but Jesse and Hank get away, with a bullet in Hank's shoulder. The sheer acting inability of this man is amazing to behold. I'm certainly no actor but every now and again I see a performance that I could outdo and Cal Bolder's here is one. I have more charisma in my sleep. Then again Bolder wasn't hired for his acting chops, he was hired because even his muscles have muscles.
He was discovered while working as a California Highway Patrolman under his real name of Earl G Craver, the agent impressed by his physique. He was 6' 4" tall, 260 pounds, with a 52" chest and a 32" waist. He isn't as dumb as he appears in this film, as he wrote a couple of novels after retiring from acting. Here he's as dumb as a post and he's destined to be Maria Frankenstein's new Igor, the giant she's been craving. Yes the two sides of this story do connect in the end, as Juanita bizarrely recommends the Frankensteins as the best hope of saving Hank's life. Quite why she would do this, I really don't know. 'Since they came here there has been nothing but death and sorrow,' she spits. They've murdered her brother and emptied her town. Yet a day or two on the road, one meeting with Jesse James, who saves her from being kidnapped by a wild Injun, and she takes them both to the painted backdrop. 'There they are', she says.
Fortunately from now on we get to see more Maria than we do Juanita. The senorita is the sort of girl who torments her beau into carrying her home on his shoulder and ravish her into shutting up, bitching all the way. Maria is a challenge. Sure, she'll kill you while you're sleeping and hook you up to a Jamaican mind transferrence device but at least she's gloriously old school in her antics. 'Wonderful,' she repeats as she salivates over her new Igor in his sickbed. We're entirely with her when she gets all uppity about being denied by Jesse James, Notorious Outlaw With a Price on His Head. 'To think that this outlaw with a price on his head refuse me for that girl,' she spits, forgetting her command of the English language and sounding more and more like Bela Lugosi as the film runs on. By the time Hank's head is shaved and the Frankensteins plot above his sleeping body, he obviously has his jaws clamped together in an attempt not to laugh.
It's here that the pulp horror antics reach their peak and we almost forget entirely about the western component. John Lupton is entirely too subdued for us to pay attention and he doesn't warrant any of the magnetism he seems to command over every lady in the film. Juanita and Maria have the choice of boring old Jesse James and young dumb hunk Hank Tracy, hardly a difficult choice for any red blooded young lady, yet both pick the notorious outlaw. Perhaps even in the nineteenth century, the ladies can't resist the draw of a bad boy celebrity. It's the only explanation I can come up with. I'm sure you can choreograph the rest of the film yourselves given that it hardly breaks new ground, except through the bizarre introduction of a brain that pulses like a heart. The dialogue descends to the level of 'Our village is free once more, thanks to you,' but should have been, 'I've just lost the last eighty some minutes of my life, thanks to you.'
I remember enjoying this movie years ago, though despising its partner in crime, Billy the Kid Meets Dracula. Revisiting it again now I can't imagine why. It's utterly unworthy of the memories I have of it, being capably shot but otherwise utterly ludicrous. Maybe it plays better on a tiny screen. Maybe it plays better if you're half asleep. Maybe it plays better if you've just watched something even worse right before it. Really it only has one thing going for it and that's the very concept of setting a gothic horror movie in the old west, not really a new idea but one that had never been used with such blatancy before. The weird western has grown in popularity over the last half century, mostly due to the work of Joe R Lansdale, and it's surely only a matter of time before he or another writer brings a great weird western script to life on the big screen in the same sort of crossover style that Bubba Ho-Tep represented. All we can know is that it isn't this.
Even though we're about to visit West Africa, the opening music by an uncredited Leo Erdody feels rather Arabian. By the time we get through the introduction that tells about 'vast areas of dense forests and swampland as yet unseen by white men' and 'virgin territory penetrated only by the Congo river', we half expect to see a giant cobra being summoned out of a basket, but no, it's just a bunch of half naked savages leaping around a tiny campfire. What makes it special isn't the natives, or even the fact that the most recognisable name in this debacle, Guy Kibbee's brother Milton, is strung up by his wrists presumably waiting to be sacrificed. It's that there's some lunatic leaping around in a white gorilla suit pretending to be the missing link. He's actually Ray Corrigan, who worked inside most of the ape suits Hollywood put into movies, at least when he wasn't playing Tucson Smith or Crash Corrigan in western series.
I knew that Manos: The Hands of Fate had been referenced by many people in the know as the real worst film of all time, including the writers of Mystery Science Theater 3000 who had effectively rescued it from cinematic oblivion. However when researching that film I found tantalising snippets about another movie that they declined to screen on their show, one that they once threw out in answer to a convention Q&A question as to whether they had seen anything worse. That movie was 1938's Child Bride, so naturally I had to add it to my Cinematic Hell viewing list. It was a US government funded movie intended to be shown as an educational piece in the Ozarks and other areas of the American deep south where it was seen as acceptable for grown men to marry young girls. And by young, I don't mean seventeen. This is a film that's in the public domain, available on cheap box sets everywhere but is still categorised at Wikipedia under 'films with a pedophile theme'. Be warned.
There's just something at once magic and awful about the old exploitation movies of the thirties and forties that offered up tantalising titillation under the pretense of educating the masses. The fake education angle had little to do with censorship, as these films weren't shown at reputable cinemas who were restricted to screening films with an official censor's seal of approval, and more about suckering in the widest possible audience. Mostly they were distributed roadshow style across the nation, an entourage breezing into town like a carnival or revival meeting to a blaze of lurid publicity, blitzing a local rented theatre and quickly moving on before the arbiters of morality in the area descended. Films were often the least important part of the show, given that they rarely delivered on their outrageous promises and the barkers made more money off the pamplets or overpriced Bibles that they hawked than they did from actual ticket sales.
We're here to be entertained and take our minds off things, says Judge Mitchell, but I wish I could take my mind off this. It's a unique story full of fascinating moral and legal questions that centre around a pair of Siamese twins committing murder and matrimony. Some are posed on the wild publicity material. 'What happens in their intimate moments?' the posters ask us. 'Is it legal to marry a Siamese twin?' 'Can they have a normal love life?' You'd think it was a porn film from all this salacious hype but it's far from that. It's a low budget exploitation picture from 1951, loosely based on real events in the lives of the Hilton Sisters, Daisy and Violet. Yes, long before Paris and Nicky there were Daisy and Violet, and they were as unlike the modern Hiltons as you could comfortably imagine. By all accounts they were pleasant, intelligent, talented ladies who simply happened to share a circulatory system. They're the Siamese twins from Tod Browning's Freaks.
There are exploitation films that surprise because of what they are or what they contain, and then there are exploitation films that continue to surprise so much that the most surprising thing of all is that they're not far more famous than they are. This little picture from Dwain Esper pulls out all the stops, with almost everything you could possibly imagine from exploitation cinema except garish colour, all stuffed into a mere 51 minute running time. What's more it was released in 1934, which seems unbelievable given some of the things that go on, though others are admittedly staples of thirties horror. Sourced primarily from Poe, it was ahead of Roger Corman by a quarter of a century. The eyeball eating scene feels like it should be in a Fulci movie half a century later. The personal take on zombies is a very modern one that writers are only now starting to get back to, three quarters of a century later. Talk about ahead of its time. Every 25 years someone catches up to something else in this film.
Any dabbler into Cinematic Hell knows that the modern trend of remaking bad films into even worse films is hardly a new one. Back in the sixties Larry Buchanan built something of a name for himself by doing precisely that when American International Pictures decided to sell material to fledgeling television companies eager to pad out their late night scheduling. The company still owned the scripts to a number of old black and white Roger Corman movies they'd released, so they hired Buchanan to remake them for a television audience. Unfortunately Buchanan had only a third of the budget Corman had to work with, which was hardly substantial to begin with, and he had to shoot in colour too. No wonder these films are awful. He churned out eight TV movies for AIP, half of which were Corman remakes and half of which I've seen. This remake of Corman's It Conquered the World is by far the worst thus far.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Nick Millard would find a career in exploitation film. His father, S S 'Steamship' Millard, was a genre pioneer, one of the legendary Forty Thieves of the exploitation roadshow circuit with larger than life characters like Louis Sonney, Leonard 'Pug' Arenson and Howard 'Pappy' Goldin. Best remembered is Dwain Esper, who directed Maniac and Marihuana and toured Freaks and Reefer Madness, but they all operated the same way. The Forty Thieves would breeze into town on a wave of publicity, like carnival barkers or revivalist preachers; lease a theatre to exhibit their latest atrocities; hawk pamphlets that made more money than tickets; then quickly breeze on out again before the authorities paid too much attention. Millard built films like 1927's Is Your Daughter Safe? from existing footage, its warning against prostitution conjured up from medical footage about venereal disease and stock footage of white slavery.
Director: Inoshiro Honda
Stars: Michael Keith, Harry Holcombe, James Yagi, Tadao Takashima, Keji Sahaka and Ichiro Arishima
It's Toho. It's Godzilla. It's presented by John Beck. It stars three Americans. Hang on, what? Well, Godzilla has a strange legacy outside his native country. Gojira, the original 1954 film in a series that ran for half a century, was never officially released outside Japan, so the iconic monster with the atomic breath was first introduced to western audiences through the Americanised version, Godzilla, King of the Monsters! in 1956. Jewell Enterprises cut the original film severely, dubbed it into English and spliced in newly shot scenes with Canadian actor Raymond Burr. Even with new footage, this version runs 16 minutes shorter than the original, but if you thought that was drastic, John Beck did more to King Kong vs Godzilla. He didn't merely add new footage but also stock footage from The Mysterians. He changed the comic tone, removed most of the character development and replaced the entire score. His film runs 11 minutes shorter than the original.
Is there any better location in which to set a monster movie than a naturist colony? A Nazi death camp would provide opportunity for fetishistic sleaze in black leather, but using a nudist camp preserves all the innocence of the old school monsters while gifting us with copious quantities of naked female flesh. The Monster of Camp Sunshine is a terrible movie, make no mistake about that, but it's also a truly surreal, bizarre and unique picture that deserves all those adjectives and more. Unlike most of the Z grade movies I've reviewed for Cinematic Hell, this is one I'd truly recommend you see, just for the experience. Apparently sincere in its message about naturism, its tongue is nonetheless firmly in its cheek when it comes to the monster and it goes full out holy batshit insane when it feels like it. The last fifteen minutes is sheer outsider genius and it takes something truly special nowadays to make this reviewer exclaim, 'What just happened?'
Director: Rafael Portillo
Stars: Ramón Gay, Rosa Arenas, Crox Alvarado, Luis Aceves Castañeda and Jorge Mondragón
What makes The Robot vs The Aztec Mummy so utterly unique is that it's a bizarre example of compound insanity, a convergence of two strange filmmaking choices. The first is that all three entries in the Aztec Mummy trilogy were shot back to back in 1957, a money saving concept that Roger Corman would later employ frequently, often following the usual process to make one film but then shooting a second on the same sets. Sometimes he would even reuse leftover sets from bigger budget productions to lend an air of class to his cheaper films. Mexican producer Pedro Calderón had successfully pioneered the back to back concept in 1956, turning out three musical comedies with the same cast and crew in less than a month, so a year later, Calderón's brother Guillermo decided to do the same thing, hiring director Rafael Portillo to shoot Attack of the Aztec Mummy, Curse of the Aztec Mummy and The Robot vs The Aztec Mummy back to back.
Nowadays we have it lucky: there are so many avenues we can follow to see classic movies that we're spoiled for choice. Back in 1946, most people only had the option of going to their local theatre to see whatever happened to be showing and the only choice they had was between the different movie houses in their town. Many would have seen Devil Monster, often on a double bill with The White Gorilla, and wondered why it seemed familiar, only to shrug it off. After all, every popular success launched a hundred cheap imitators and many classic era films were remakes to begin with, even famous ones like The Maltese Falcon. Those who paid attention though may have realised that Devil Monster didn't just seem familiar, it was really something they had seen before. You see, not one single moment within this entire film is original. Everything was patched together from stock footage and older movies that the 'filmmakers' had bought the rights to.
Chesty Morgan was a freak of nature, like so many of the actors who populate Cinematic Hell, a very popular one who made a lot of money out of a particular physical quirk that Mother Nature chose to gift her with: a 73FF bust. This makes her look rather unlike anyone you've ever seen, because anything of similar stature is probably the result of implant surgery and porn stars with giant balloons in their chests don't look remotely like Chesty Morgan. When constrained by an ambitious bra her assets provide a truly daunting cleavage, but when freed from captivity the laws of gravity ensure that they reach almost to her waist. Given that they're the entire point of this movie (as well as a companion piece called Deadly Weapons), we get to see a lot of them, in every meaning of the word. The excuse here is that she's a spy with a camera implanted into her left breast so she effectively has to get topless to partake in the plot.
I'm sure you're not going to be surprised to find that something called The Wild Women of Wongo isn't some existential Ingmar Bergman picture, though it does start with an arty introduction from Mother Nature herself. Unfortunately it isn't an early Girls Gone Wild video either, done 1958 style with Bettie Page and a host of tiki room beauties, but it's a lot closer to that than Bergman because this one does at least have a girl in a leopard skin outfit wrestling an alligator. She's Jean Hawkshaw, and like almost everyone else involved in this picture, this was the only thing she did. Cedric Rutherford didn't write anything else. James Wolcott didn't direct anything else, except to patch together some old Laurel and Hardy shorts into a compilation in 1967. The other star, Johnny Walsh, did make 29 movies but he was only credited in three of them, and trust me, we're not looking at Johnny Walsh in this picture.
Director: Dick Ashe
Stars: Chase Cordell, Donna Leigh Drake, Gregorio Sala and Patrick Wright
Track of the Moon Beast is one of those unfortunate films that are doomed to be remembered for the wrong reasons, not that there are any good reasons to remember it. Unlike many of the films I've reviewed for Cinematic Hell, it's not 'so bad it's good', it's so bad it's just bad. Shot in 1972 but not released until a distribution deal could be reached in 1976, that perhaps explains why Dick Ashe never made another film. He'd moved up from assistant director positions on a couple of other films to helm this solo, but then... nothing. His work is no worse than what you'd see on any random TV movie in the seventies, just as the cast easily fit that bill too. None of them seem quite right but they're not really awful. In almost every way this film is just forgettable, but it has a way of striking a nerve for people as something more. In particular, Kevin Murphy, a writer for MST3K, explained that the character of Johnny Longbow was one of the best they'd encountered.
Mesa of Lost Women is two films in one but that's two too many. It started out under the working title of Tarantula, which would have been original at the time as Jack Arnold's movie of the same name didn't arrive until 1955, but this one didn't arrive at all, partly because the funds started to run out but mostly because writer/director Herbert Tevos was a little too good at driving the cast and crew into quitting. A couple of years later, his replacement was one of the more fascinating names in exploitation cinema, Ron Ormond, who wasn't just a writer, producer and director of low budget movies, but also a vaudeville performer, magician and Air Force colonel. At this point he was known mostly for his Lash LaRue westerns, but this mess proved to be his ticket into an ever more eclectic world that soon included gorilla sleaze, frigid wife sexploitation and Nashville musicals. Eventually he would turn to Jesus and become the foremost name in Christploitation.
The tagline on the poster cries, 'Nothing so appalling in the annals of horror!' but unfortunately it was referencing to the quality of this 1963 shocker rather than its contents. The film's director, exploitation maestro Herschell Gordon Lewis, likened it to a Walt Whitman poem: 'It's no good,' he said, 'but it's the first,' and he's right. While Japanese films like 1960's Jigoku may technically predate it, this is the original gore movie, arguably the most influential horror film since the days of the classic Universal monster movies. Details vary depending on the reports but it was shot in around a week on a budget of less than $25,000 and became an instant hit at drive-ins across America, grossing over $4m for Lewis and his business partner, legendary exploitation producer David Friedman. Given that it's truly inept on every front, why was it so massively popular? The answer is simple: it delivered exactly what it promised, unlike anything that went before it.
on DVD 
on DVD 
on DVD 
on DVD 
on DVD
on DVD 
on DVD 
on DVD 
on DVD!
on DVD 