It's hard to believe that Devil Girl From Mars may have once scared the pants off baby boomers of the mid-1950s. The plot of the film has many similarities to the 1951 classic The Day The Earth Stood Still.
Martian Nyah, played by Patricia Laffan, is a sex starved, female version of Darth Vader who comes to earth to find men to take back to mars for breeding purposes. She comes dressed in a tight black outfit and cape, and carries a deadly ray gun. Her spaceship crashes in the hills of Scotland.
Joining Nyah is her oversized robot shaped like a kitchen appliance with a police light on top. The robot zaps anything and anyone in his path with an atomic ray, including humans who do not obey Nyah. He walks with a pace slower than a common snail, making it easy for victims to get away.
Nyah projects an invisible ray around a local Scottish Inn to keep the occupants contained while she decides which men to take back to mars with her. The occupants make several attempts to stop Nyah, but are unable to foil her plot. One of the occupants, an escaped murderer from a local jail, agrees to return to mars with Nyah in exchange for sparing the lives of the remaining inn occupants. While onboard Nyah's ship, he is able to destroy it, spoiling any future plans to return to earth for more men.
Most 1950s sci-fi films portray women as helpless victims while the men are busy being the heroes and saving the day. Devil Girl From Mars, however, reverses this formula a bit. Nyah is an evil queen from another world who has come to terrorize male victims. Was this a bold feminist statement for the 1950s? Perhaps. But only if Nyah had been successful in her attempts to bring back men to mars. Nevertheless, this is what makes Devil Girl From Mars unique from so many other 50s sci-fi flicks. Enjoy, and happy viewing!
Steve D. Stones
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Retread monster: Frankenstein 1970
By Doug Gibson"Frankenstein 1970" is pretty bad. And that's a shame, since the 1958 independent film, directed by Howard Koch, stars Boris Karloff as Baron Victor Von Frankenstein, last descendant of the infamous Dr. Frankenstein. Von Frankenstein, who suffers torture wounds received at the hands of the Nazis, allows a film crew to his castle to make a movie. Wih the cash, they give him, he uses an atomic reactor to, after killing him, turn a former servant into a reanimated monster. More murders follow.
This film is just flat, more soap opera and corny interludes from cliched characters -- film crew, Dr. Frankenstein's solemn colleague -- than terror. The monster is a huge letdown. It just has a box on its head with slits for eyes. Even Karloff isn't that good. His languid, tired appearance seems like he is just phoming in his performance. His salary -- $26,000, was more than a fifth of the entire budget. Despite the futuristic title, is never clear if it really is 1970. In fact, the film's settings look like its late-'50s timeframe.
The best scene is the opening scene, where a terrified young lovely is pursued to her doom by a monster in a lake. Unfortunately, a "director" yells cut and we learn that it's the movie company. That's about if fright-wise. The 83-minute feature also featured Norbert Schiller, Jana Lund, Donald "Red" Barry and Charlotte Austin. Watch it only for Karloff. Even at his most lackluster, he still has worth for cult films fans. Watch the trailer above!
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Mars has a Wizard: Wizard of Mars
I really love this 1963 David Hewitt ultra-low budget space opera. I'll say right off that one of the aliens in this film is the same "Space Monster" from the Leonard Katzman schlock-fare also called Space Probe Taurus.
Ripped off from L. Frank Baum's famous tale, The Wizard of Oz, here is the Wikipedia description of 85-minute, color "The Wizard of Mars":
The title character is portrayed by John Carradine, who gives a lengthy monologue as a projection near the end of the film. The film centers on four astronauts--Steve (Roger Gentry), "Doc" (Vic McGee), Charlie (Jerry Rannow), and of course, Dorothy (Eve Bernhardt), shown aboard ship wearing Silver Shoes--who dream they are struck by a storm and encounter the Horrors of the Red Planet (one of the film's video retitlings), and eventually follow a "Golden Road" to the Ancient City where they encounter the title character, who is the collective consciousness of all Martians.
It's that crazy. The characters are wonderful stock space opera fare: The older mentor astronaut. The sexy woman astronaut who eventually gets the hots for the stud, leader astronaut. And, of course, there's the wisecracking astronaut. There is Hewitt's signature of touch of foamy, wavy fire waves that he has used in other films. I particularly like a strange creature -- guided by offscreen hands -- that menace the astronauts while they row in a Martian canal. The creature looks like a low-rent Tingler!
The space fare is low budget and I love the asteroid showers! This is a fun film. I first became aware of it while watching Something Weird OnDemand trailers. I found it on an old VHS that was titled Horrors of the Red Planet and said Lon Chaney Jr. was in it? WRONG. I later learned that Wizard of Mars was shopped as "Alien Massacre" along with Hewitt's schlocky "Gallery of Horrors," which features Chaney Jr. Such is the life of low-budget sci-fi being peddled in the early days of VHS and even Beta!
It became almost an obsession to find this film with its original title, and Plan 9 Crunch finally did, and old 80s VHS release had it. Carradine s wonderfully bizarre spouting nonsensical dialogue as "The Wizard." Of course it's all a dream. That really doesn't make sense, but again, the film really doesn't make sense. I loved it. Watch it as a double-feature with "Space Monster" or Hewitt's better "Journey to the Center of Time." You won't be disappointed.
-- Doug Gibson
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Shock Waves
Besides Cushing, John Carradine hams it up early as the tourist boat captain, but he's killed off early, as is Cushing. Apparently, both worked four days for $5,000. The entire budget was $200,000. A very young, gorgeous Brooke Adams plays a bikini clad diving tourist. She is the only survivor. I don't feel bad about revealing that plot point since her rescue scene comes early and the rest of the film is flashback. That robs the film of much tension since we already know who will survive and who won't.
The SS inferi are creepy, with faces that are a blend of fishbelly white and green algae. However, their uniforms seem in way too good condition to have been underwater for three decades! The film has moments that scare, but the script and several actors are weak, the script can't decide whether to be a horror film or mystery, and the killing scenes are surprisingly tame. It's worth a rental or a cheap purchase, and it has developed small cult following the past 30-plus years. Read my Plan9Crunch colleague Steve Stones' review here.
-- Doug Gibson
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