Category: Film Review

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 18 minutes, rated 5.3 by 1231 cinemitizens
Verdict: Better than many of its kind. Atta girl!

In distant 1990 lunar travel is routine and on Moon Base One plans advance for flights to Venus and to Mars. On earth all is peace and goodwill. Yes, fiction alright.
Sherlock Holmes, clipboard in hand, runs the show. Carmine Orrico will board the Venus flight and Judi will go to Mars. Judi and Carmine are an item. Her flight will be first and Carmine accepts that with good cheer and moral support. Already there are differences from others of this ilk. The woman is an astronaut, not a nutritionist, coffee bearer, or object of either sexism or comic distress. She is just there to do a job. Moreover, Carmine is urging her on.
Wait! Before the off there comes into this carefully planned (see clipboard for details) program a message from the stars. SETI answers. Dit-dat-dat-dot it goes and by consulting the screenplay they can decipher this static as: ‘Hello! Our ambassador is on the way in a spaceship.’
Anticipation moves Sherlock to give a speech. Mercifully brief. Wisely he does not tell Faux News.
Next thing another message arrives. This one is a video log. Check the release data above. Somehow these star travelling aliens have managed to transmit a smartphone video log to the Moonies.
The alien ship.
It is exotic indeed, this video. It is from the ambassador-bearing ship which, by relying on Apple Maps hit Mars instead of Earth and has crashed. ‘Help!’ is this second message.
All hands to the clichés! They launch the Mars rocket first and Judi goes. Carmine mopes. Of course things go wrong. then Carmine tanks up his rocket to go to the rescue. No Apple maps for him! It’s Rand McNally or bust!
Meanwhile, Judi and company have found the alien ship. More moody, exotic interiors, where they find one dead green skin and another barely alive whom they cart to their damaged ship. Humanoid it seems. More so than most Republicans in Congress. Female it seems with a beehive hairdo, sort of. Let’s call her Queenie for reasons to be explained.
She revives. Easy Rider nurses her back to health. So he thinks. Meanwhile she examines the menu. By now Carmine has arrived. We have a full complement on the spaceship of Otranto. But not for long.
Queenie dilates her eyes and Easy Rider falls at her feet. He is the first course. Yum! Yum!
The fraternity brothers loved what came next.
Captain Science, Carmine, and Judi find Easy Rider deceased. Queenie is still licking his blood from her lips.
Hmm. Captain Science is not sure she did it. He is obtuse enough to be a professor. ‘Of course she did it,’ shouts Carmine! Grudgingly Captain Science admits she must have. But he says — get this — ‘We cannot judge her!’ ‘What [bleep, bleep],’ shouts Carmine! ‘We sure can!’
It was all too much like a cultural sensitivity training course, or worse, a snowflake seminar.
‘No, no,’ says Captain Science. ‘Murder and cannibalism are just her cultural ways which we must respect.’ Carmine proposes that she respect his cultural ways while he puts a pistol to her head. ‘No, no’ reiterates Captain Science: What we do is we tie her up and feed her on the blood plasma [we carry for just such emergencies] during the return flight. Is there a shortage of vampires in Hollywood that they have to import another one? So asked the fraternity brothers.
And — get this! — continues Captain Science, if we run low on blood plasma, then we will have to….. Yes, drain our blood for her dinner. Carmine is not on board for this. Captain Science is so unfit for command, I wondered why he was not POTUS.
Any guesses for where this going?
None of them were ever Boy Scouts so when it comes to knots, tying shoes laces is it. Slip knots are called that for a reason. Having slept off digesting Easy Rider, she waltzes free the moment she wakes up.
She dilates her eyes again and the Captain Science drops his test tubes. Two down. Victims of cultural relativity.
The eyes will have it!
Carmine calls Sherlock who tells him to man-up because Queenie is more important than a couple of underlings. There is an ominous implication that the loss of a couple more underlings named Carmine and Judi would not phase Sherlock one bit. ‘Bring her in, unharmed,’ he orders. They shoe lace her up again.
Got it? Yep. She is free again and has eyes for Carmine. He is pasta in her hands and she is about to dine when…..
Judi crashes the party, belts her, and scratches Queenie’s shoulder. Queenie runs off in a snit. Carmine regains such consciousness as he has. Slugger Judi dusts her knuckles.
Unarmed Judi and Carmine set off to find her. Dumb, but turns out Queenie is royalty and green-bled to death. That very big word ‘haemophilia’ was used much to the annoyance of the fraternity brothers who reached for the aspirin. Evidently all royals are bleeders. Hence the title ‘Queen of Blood.’
They speculate that Queenie was a telepath who could control men, but not women. The fraternity brothers scoffed at that conclusion. Oola, who was green, had no need of telepathy to control them.
They land and Sherlock is happy enough with an autopsy. The end.
That Kingie might come in search of Queenie does not cross a page of the script. That they have been party to the death of the first two aliens they have met gives no pause for remorse. Instead we have the eggs she has hidden on board, which Sherlock wants for an omelet. She is a queen in another way, a Queen Bee or a Queen Ant. That explains her hunger. Yeah, right.
It was marketed under several other titles to catch unwary theatregoers, including ‘Planet of Blood,’ ‘Planet of Terror,’ ‘Planet of Vampires,’ and ‘The Green Woman.’ None of it takes place on a planet; another triumph from the marketing department. Since there is only one, the plural is also erroneous. Green, yes, that is conceded.
Get this, jaded Reader: Not only does no one deprecate the woman astronaut, but she saves the day. Go girl!
Moreover, no one smokes. In era when an actor could not play a scientist without a pipe there are no pipes, and no ciggies either.
The alien space ship scenes were cut from a Russian Sy Fy film and pasted into this one. That inserting was often done in Roger Corman productions, but in this case it was well done, which was not often done in Roger Corman productions. The lighting, set design, and camera work is such that the seams do not show. Curtis Harrington was the director and he made maximum use of these aspects to create an eerie, mysterious, and alien atmosphere.
He later directed Debbie Reynolds, Simone Signoret, Katherine Ross, and Shelly Winters in other films. Impressive. He often worked in television. The black widow is a theme in a number of his other works, some of which he wrote, as he did this title. He wrote the story around the available footage from the Soviet film, whereas in most Corman productions the Soviet footage was shoe-horned into a story that was already written or even filmed, and it always showed.
Carmine had his first role in 1954, and he is still at it with a 2018 credit and 200 others in between. Those monkey glands must work a treat. His reputation remains as, hmm, someone with interesting lifestyle choices even by Hollywood standards. Johnny Depp is a homeboy in comparison.
This film was made simultaneously with another Roger Corman production, ‘Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet’ (1965), also derived from cuttings of the same Russkie movie, reviewed elsewhere on this blog. Keeping his white coat on and clipboard in hand, Sherlock walked from one side of the set to the other to do his lines for the other film. The man was the consummate professional, doing two roles in two different movies at once. Curtis Harrington directed that, too, but chose a pseudonym to protect the guilty.
Corman bought Russian Sy Fy films for two reasons, and in this order. First, they were cheap. Second they had superior special effects, though these were often mangled when inserted into Corman productions. The word on the internet street is that in 1950s when the Space Race began, some wits in Soviet policy decided to enthuse the populace for space with Sy Fy films and budgeted for the special effects. That is what caught Corman’s eye.

IMDb meta-data: 1 hour and 1 minute to treacle time, rated an astounding 5.2 by 277 masochists.
Verdict: a creature feature devoid of both.
Universal Studios broke the gender barrier in creature features with a trilogy of wild, captive, and jungle women films. This is the second instalment on this mercifully short-lived franchise.
The first was ‘Captive Wild Woman’ (1943), reviewed elsewhere on this blog. This earlier film was a masterclass in making something from the nothing on a micro-budget. A third of that film’s one hour time was clipped from a still earlier Universal film, ‘The Big Cage’ (1933). But director Edward Dymtryk did it so well, there was no distraction. Not so here.
About a quarter of the runtime of this treacle is excerpted from ‘Captive Wild Woman’ (which excerpts include scenes from ‘The Big Cage’ as explained above). In this movie the underside of the weave shows. To accommodate this earlier material much of this script is set out in flashbacks. Long before Roger Corman this studio had learned to plagiarise itself.

Evelyn Ankers is top billed but has but one opening scene of three minutes and then disappears. In fact that scene is a lift from ‘Captive Wild Woman,’ recycled here. Ditto Dr Adams. The ever reliable Douglas Dumbrille has one early scene and is gone.
There is no jungle and no woman to speak of, though Acquanetta reprises her role as Cheela the ape come human. This time she speaks. What a mistake that was. Silent, she had mystery. Speaking she had adenoids.
A screen shot of Cheela from the earlier film is included for, the fraternity brothers timed it, five seconds, and that is it. That does not a creature feature make.
Not only is there no creature in this feature, there is also no mad scientist. In the earlier film John Carradine filled this vacuum perfectly. Here we have a kindly doctor who by circumstance finds the ape woman on his rounds. J. Carrol Naish brings a calm and reflective intensity to this role, which in other material would have been compelling, but here, it is undercut by the crude simplicity of the sieved pot boiler in which the role is immersed.
Universal had made a place for itself in cinema-land in the 1930s with horror films. Indeed some pundits credit it with establishing that genre in films with such masterpieces as ‘Frankenstein’ (1931). In this franchise it previously broached the gender line with ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ (1935) where Elsa Lancaster stole that show.
How low could Universal go? Well, that will be seen in the third movie in this Jungle franchise, ‘Jungle Captive’ (1945). Scuba gear maybe required.

IMDb meta-data is this 13 one-hour episodes rated 7.5 from 7501 cinemitizens
Verdict: Excellent and a relief after the sappy hyperbole of ‘Mission to Mars’ (2000), reviewed elsewhere on this blog. But it bogs down, running out of story while the camera goes on and on.

A docudrama about the first Mars landing in 2033 interspersed with 2016 talking heads describing the technical, scientific, and human problems that have to be surmounted to get there. These details are larded with some elevated rhetoric about the purpose in going to Mars.
Purpose? ‘Because it is there,’ that is the distillation of that rhetoric. We see twice the same clip from Jack’s speech in Houston about it being hard, as a justification for the commitment. (I stood at that podium in 2018.) He and Edmund Hilary have a lot to answer for. On this point there will be more below.
Still it was refreshing to hear the optimism and determination from the enthusiasts like Elon Musk who are trying to make it happen. Happily Richard Branson did not put in an appearance to steal the scene with his look-at-me camera mannerisms. Though NASA is represented among the talkers, one theme is that private enterprise can go where no government is willing to go. That would seem pertinent now since the current NASA Administer-nominee wants to eliminate from its charter ‘the expansion of human knowledge’ because God does not like that.
In later episodes I learned that the early Moon missions were trials for Mars in the minds of the NASA scientists and others. Moon was a stepping stone to Mars. That is much emphasised, and it completely escaped me at the time when the Moon seemed enough. However, though it is passed in silence in this telling, Moon was the strategic goal for the military, whose role in space is omitted. Yet those rockets belonged to the US Air Force. There was certainly much popular speculation that near space or Moon would offer an invulnerable missile platform.
As the talking heads lay out how it would go, we cut to a dramatic sequences where it is acted out. In reality, no vampires, zombies, meteors, cave women, enlarged spiders, hostile natives, or man eating daisies are needed to make a mission to Mars deadly. (These possibilities have all been covered in the Mars filmography on this blog.) There are many things that can go wrong, and inevitably some of them will.
Gravity kills. Elemental that. The first death is a fall. A lung is punctuated by a broken rib. Nothing can be done and….
The fall occurs because a fuse blew upon entering the Martian atmosphere and while Captain was replacing it the planet’s gravity clicked in and he fell. Bang.
Because the fuse was not replaced they land a long way for the base camp that had been prepared by robots. To get there, they will have to walk with the dying captain.

Can they walk 75 kilometres before the oxygen in their backpacks runs out? And before the fraternity get bored?
We have a polyglot crew, and also interspersed are fictional pre-flight interviews with them. The point is I guess to indicate what kind of person signs on for this and perhaps to inspire such persons. To me, these were insipid but perhaps my jaded ear was listening.
One of the sticking points from all the talking heads is a double whammy. Everything done on approaching Mars will be done for the first time. No amount of testing. No simulations. No nothing is a Mars test. Mars tests have to be done on Mars.
Moreover, for everything there is only shot. Miss and that’s it. Either you die or return to Earth. If the window of landing is missed it is back to Earth. If the ship hits the atmosphere at the wrong angle, it burns on descent, or crashes on landing, or misses the site by kilometers, or worse, and spins off into space.
I liked the realism. I liked the honesty that things will go wrong. I liked it that the struggle to walk is plainly a struggle, and so on.
Because it was not a military operation, the chain of command was unclear to me. I said ‘Captain’ above but the term is not used.
Later there is an explanation for the failure to continue with Moon. Again it passed me by at the time. the near failure of Apollo XIII caused the Nixon administration and Congress to think twice. No one wanted the public responsibility of a mortal failure. The compromise result was to concentrate on near space with the shuttles. The irony is that deaths occurred, and the Reagan administration did what others did not have the conviction to do, go on.
However by episode six I found it repetitive and boring. On Mars we see much trudge and toil without sufficient explanation of purpose. Are they doing science? Preparing for colonisation? Waiting for the next catastrophe? Looking for new script pages? There is a lot of marking time, leaving the actors little to do.
The death of the botanist was a missed opportunity to this viewer. It just seemed too pat and almost a photocopy of the death of Captain earlier, walking into the light. What killed him was the ten-week dust storm and that was not brought home. Instead it seemed he just went stir crazy. If so, it was some selection process that yielded him for the job. Others were killed in that incident but only the botanist is mourned.
The 2033+ segments divide between the crew on Mars and head offices in London and Vienna. (No idea why two except to offer different cityscapes.) The latter seems pointless. Much posturing. It does allow one of the players a dual role. BFD. There seems to be the usual back biting and bickering, but it adds nothing to the focus: Mars. Nor is the office politics well realised. Most of these episodes are board meetings where twelve extras sit silently. One images the members of the board are as bored as the viewer.
The 2037 press conference seemed silly. The vultures of the press are seated in an orderly manner, already unrealistic, meters away from the podium. Why? So that when the revelation is announced they can be viewed from above swarming the podium like the amoeba in an earlier microscope image. It looks staged because it is. It seems heavy-handed because it is.
Only a few so-called critics’ reviews are attached its entry on the IMDb, and none of these is from a significant media source like the ‘New York Times.’ Nor are any from the Sy Fyians who cover the fictional accounts of Mars. Finally there are only a half dozen of them, which is a small number for a recent release. Odd. I did find the NYT review which is lukewarm for the kinds of reasons given here.
In addition, the IMDb critics are mostly negative. Some complain that it is neither fish nor fowl. Neither is it a sustained documentary, nor a fiction. Yep that is right but it is also irrelevant since it sets out to dramatise some of the points made in the documentary. This criticism is like saying Impressionist painting is too colourful. That is the point.
Others fault the acting. Huh. I thought the acting was fine. Though the players are all unknown to me, they seemed to fit the roles they had. They were young. They were stupid brave. As I read this criticism it dawned on me that the writers perhaps wanted a Hollywood name. Not me when I recalled the acting I have seen in Mars films from Hollywood names, mugging, soulful pouting, gung-ho nonsense, selfie sticking, and the like. Whereas I concluded the use of unknowns was a good choice to place emphasis on the mission rather than on the personalities, and the pre-conceptions audiences bring to Hollywood names.
I say ‘unknowns’ to admit my ignorance, not to denigrate the players.
But I would say on further viewing that the script gives the players little to do after the first four episodes.
The Jordanian Tourist Board got pipped on this one. The Mars outdoors scenes were filmed in Morocco. Seems appropriate since Moroccan leather binding on books is always red. To judge from the extensive terminal credits most of it was processed in that capital of cinema, Hungary. I noticed in the credits a ‘Data Wrangler.’ But by episode six there was a Data Wrangler, a First Assistant Data Wrangler, and — guess! — a Second Assistant Data Wrangler. It runs to twelve parts in all so what can we expect for this entry at the end?

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 1 minute, rated at 5.7 by 584 cinemitizens.
Another lie from the marketing department, since as explained below the ape could not carry off that woman, for it was herself. Got it? Read on.
Verdict: a masterclass is making something from nothing.
John Carradine, before he became a caricature of himself, is in top form as the scientist who goes on and on, and changes from a charming genius to a mad and bad scientist.

He finds a way in the script to transfer the secretions of glands from one animal to another. This transference leads to a transformation. The dog receiving rabbit secretions becomes a rabbit! ‘Would it work for Trumpettes,’ asked the fraternity brothers! ‘Could they be made human?’ Or is that too much even for a scriptwriter to conceive.
Suspend that disbelief and go along for the ride.
In the early stages of these experiments his findings, somehow, aid human patients. He publishes his work in learned journals. This being the first time in the Mad Scientist Genre I have seen where publications figure. He presses outward on the boundaries of knowledge, narrowing his eyes and lowering his voice. Can a nationally competitive grant be far away?
Then by chance through a new patient he goes to an animal circus and sees a very pliable stunt man in an ape suit. The idea hatches.
He will transfer human secretions into this ape, who then become a human woman. Stuntman to human woman, presents no problem for the scriptwriter. The transference drains, i.e., kills the human patient. ‘They have (unknowingly and involuntarily) sacrificed their pitiful lives for the advancement of knowledge,’ Carradine intones, as only he could. It is a small price (for someone else to) pay for his career.
Hmm. I might have believed it if he had said that they were killed to fatten his CV, meet his KPIs, or win a nationally completive NH&MRC grant. That would be credible in the world McKinsey has made.
Other mad scientists who play god usually have a purpose: sometimes they want make slaves of others, to make superhumans who reach the stars, or plumb ocean depths, vote Republican into eternity, or get tenure. Not in this case. He wants to do it because he can. Mad science for mad science’s sake. Nothing instrumental involved. Pure research!
Something from nothing? About a third of the short run time is excerpted from an earlier Universal movie called ‘The Big Cage’ (1933) about an animal circus, featuring Clyde Beatty (1903-1965) who was a remarkable lion tamer, animal trainer, and circus impresario. Director Edward Dymytryk cut and pasted these excerpts so well that the seams do not show. In this he was added by great lighting, make-up, and editing. Doc Adams was cast as the animal trainer because he resembled Beatty as he had been in that earlier film. All in all, the film is technically superb and the print I found on You Tube was clean and crisp.
The result is a rattling yarn. Carradine succeeds but finds a stinger at the end. Doc Adams cracks the whip. Evelyn Ankers, Martha Vickers, Fay Helm, and Acquanetta kept the fraternity brothers watching.
Evelyn was married to a personal favourite, Richard Denning, who was away at war when she made this film, hoping the yellow telegram would not come.
Ankers and Denning together in the 1950s.
Martha Vickers’s single line in the film is ‘Well, I…’ But she lies around comatose in a hospital bed. She was preparing for her role in ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946). Fay Helm injects some humanity when she tries to stop Carradine. Of Acquanetta the less said, the better, but her make-up and transitions set a new standard for the genre. She speaks not word one. Correct. Completely silent. Considering what she did to her few subsequent roles that was a good choice. It is said that she was difficult with whom to work. At the time and place, for a woman that was often code for not being sexually compliant.
The entrepreneurial Crash Corrigan (1902-1976) was the stuntman in the ape suit. An acceptable ape suit was expensive and time-consuming to make. Genre horror pictures were then by definition quick and cheap, so they had no time and no budget for such matters. Corrigan saw a market niche and made it his own and passed out business cards: ‘Have ape suit, will travel.’ He was in demand for about a decade for horror movies, commercials in cinemas and later on television, openings of stores and malls, extravagant Hollywood parties, USO tours, charity fundraisers, Trumpette conventions, and more.
Crash started out in B-Westerns where he did his own stunts. In time he concentrated on stunt work which he found more interesting and less taxing than remembering and delivering lines. He got the nickname ‘Crash’ as a college football player for his open field tackling, not for his automobile driving.
He showed entrepreneurial flair again when he bought a ranch in the Simi Valley and rented it out as set for movies, serials, and television shows. He also staged western shows there for tourists. Crash knew how to make cash.
John Carradine developed the habit early of taking any part he could get, because he wanted the money to pour into his Pasadena Shakespeare Company. And pour money into it he did, but in the end it failed, but by then he retained the habit of answering ‘Yes’ when a part was offered. See his subsequent career.
Edward Dmytryk (1908-1999) directed such movies as ‘Caine Mutiny’ (1954) and ‘The Left Hand of God’ (1955) both starring Humphrey Bogart. He worked his way up the pecking order, starting with B genre films like this and ‘The Falcon Strikes Back’ (1943) to ‘Cornered’ (1945) and on to ‘Crossfire’ (1947) and ‘Mirage’ (1965), for a total of fifty-six credits.
Born in Canada he was an orphaned juvenile delinquent in San Francisco who was proud of his Ukrainian heritage. He started working as messenger boy for a studio and then projectionist where he learned the technology, film editor to become the lead director for RKO’s A-Picture department.
He was imprisoned by HUAC for refusing to answer questions, being one of the Hollywood Ten used by that execrable body to publicise itself. His name and his father’s origins in Russia, made him an early and easy target, and his defiance made great copy for the vultures of the media and the Committee.

IMDb meta-data: run time 1 hour and 34 minutes, rated a paltry 7.3 by a mere 16,696 cinemitizens.
Verdict: Classic.

Any circle drawn around the best Sy Fy movies of the 1950s, the decade when the genre was at its peak, includes ‘Them!’ It is a gem in every respect and retains the capacity to startle even jaded recidivist viewers like the fraternity brothers.
Before all that judgemental stuff though, first comes the set up. We start with a Cessna spotter aircraft flying over a desert dotted with Joshua Trees, the pilot in radio communication with two state patrolmen cruising down an empty highway in the high bright sun. The flyer spots movement and circles in on it. It is a child walking determinedly through the bleaching sun.
Sandy Descher
The patrolmen divert their car into the sand, to catch up and grab this nine-year old in a bathrobe with a broken doll. They have to grab her because she just keeps striding into the distance. She is mute and wide-eyed in shock, and she steals the show. Who is she? Where did she come from? Someone must be looking for her.
But who and where?
As darkness falls the police officers find a vacation trailer, ripped apart, and pieces that match her doll but no people, dead or alive. Further along at a gas station they find another scene of devastation. Picture an end of semester beer bust at Sig House and there it is: a disgusting mess. In each place sugar is much in evidence to we viewers but not remarked on by the plod. They radio all this in and a response is mobilized. One of the troopers, wearing a red undershirt, stays at the gas station to look around while the other drives to the hospital to see the child. Oh, oh.
Earlier Mr Pomfritt had collected her in an ambulance in a great scene. The three adults loading her hear a sound on the desert winds and look back at it, while behind them unseen she rises from the stretcher with a look of silent terror and falls back comatose. Marvellous.
The patrolman who stayed behind meets the fate of all Red Shirts. That’s why the fraternity brothers never wear Red Shirts.
They find footprints of a sort and make casts and take photographs. Since the trailer was rented by an FBI agent on leave, that bureau sends in Marshall Dillon to sort things out. He dutifully reports everything up the pipe to DC.
Next thing two myrmecologists show up and the plot thickens. After the ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ Edmund Gwen turned to ants along with his very professional daughter. These two are bug hunters worthy of Starship Trooper badges.
Spoilers follow.
The Trinity nuclear tests ten years ago at Alomogordo have produced some giant mutant ants now roaming the desert in search of…sugar.
Santa confirms this with the shocked child by giving her a sniff of ant juice. She utters the title!
Unforgettable to see her small face contorted in terror saying ‘Them!’ If she had said ‘The Thing!’ It would have been an whole other story because, as the fraternity brothers know, Marshall Dillion in a rubber head prosthesis was that Thing in the earlier movie of that title, reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
She is so compelling not even that notorious scene stealer James Whitmore had a chance, he of he mugs, eye brow wiggling, ear pulling, and snorting expertise.
Oddly for the time and place no one wonders if a woman can be a scientist or makes any stupid jokes about her. Just as well because later she is a dab hand with the flamethrower. Mostly the chaps stand back and let her get on with it. Very wise, chaps.
Santa gives lectures and prognosticates, but with Gwen it is almost fun listening to him. The mutant ants are going to take over the earth unless some Rid is applied soon and in a big way. Does Rid work on Trumpettes, asked the fraternity brothers?
The business is so dire that it is top secret and kept that way. Ha, as if some grunt won’t spill the whole story to a jackal of the press for a five spot. Well it is a work of fiction. The media then would exercise its responsibility to scatter confusion, panic, and destruction.
While on the fictitious nature of the film, there is quick and general agreement along the Potomac to act and to follow Santa’s direction. What does someone from the North Pole know about ants in the desert is a question no one asks. Both army and police personnel are serious, sober, sane, and disciplined, so we knew it was fake news. Not a self-serving careerist is in the lens frame.
The bugs head for the sugar capital of Lost Angeles! Bug hunting season opens in the sewers of Tinsel Town. Dr Daughter is ruthless and wants to kill them all! None of that scientific impulse to keep one alive for study. In fact she insists not just that they be killed, but also that when dead they be burned to ashes! The fraternity brother cringed on the sofa.
The police uniforms were a thing of wonder with braid, insignia, badges, stripes, chevrons, epaulets, gaudy enough for this month’s African dictator for life.
Something like this.
A reformed Mr Pomfritt after he went bad in ‘The Man from Planet X’ (1951), reviewed elsewhere on this blog, rides the ambulance.
It was filmed in the Mojave desert, or a facsimile thereof, with those Joshua Trees. How is it that a film set in the desert Southwest does not include any Latinos or Native Americans remains a good question. But it doesn’t and it has plenty of white-bread company in the genre.
On the other hand Davy Boone (figure it out) and Mr Spock are also present.
Mr Spock under cover.
The project had started as a big budget, Colour, and 3D picture from Warner Brothers. Uh uh, but Jack Warner always blanched at big budgets and even before the first shot it had been cut back to black and white and a flat 2D.

IMDb meta-data hour and 21 minutes, rated 7.7 by 13,422 cinemitizens
Verdict: Deserves a higher rating. Much.
Grant Williams gradually finds his clothes are getting bigger. Hmmm. Is it the new laundry detergent? Is he losing weight? Is his ego diminishing? He consults Mr Pomfritt (in a very early role) and finds it is none of the above.

Act I is the shrinking Grant, which was caused by a freak combination of exposure to pesticides and then later to radiation in separate incidents, each an accident. Separately each exposure was harmless but in sequence… While medical science is mobilised, Grant denies this is happening to him. But then medical science fails.
Act II, Grant reacts in anger to his loss of stature. He lashes out at his wife, gamely played by Kansan Randy Stuart. He becomes ensconced in a doll house with ever smaller Ken Doll clothing. There is some bargaining here as for a time his shrinking seems arrested, but only for a time.
Grant becomes a media spectacle as the meat eaters nearly batter down his door to get pictures of this living Ken Doll freak with the sensitivity we have come to expect of the free media. The vultures can never get enough dead meat. That kindles a siege mentality in Grant.
Act III, the cat! The one-time pet cat has to be kept out of the house now, and, [see if you can guess] it sneaks in one day as Randy is leaving for work. Someone has to earn a crust since micro-Grant is no longer payroll material.
In the battle with the cat, Grant is shut into the cellar, and the final act is his struggle to survive in the vast, inhospitable reaches of this savage world of half empty paint cans, off cuts from carpets, cracked tiles, battered suit cases, a rusty lawn mower, a leaking water heater, a gaseous furnace, and the cellar wild life that is larger than he is. He is at first depressed but then wills himself to continue. There are some great moments here as this mini-Tarzan struggles against the odds in this terrifying yet mundane world.
But he continues to shrink and he comes to accept his fate as cosmic unity, or something. The end.
The master narrative is that as Grant changes physically, he also changes emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. The mental changes born of frustration and fear drive a wedge between his only solace, Randy, and himself. He knows he is doing it, but cannot stop himself.

The ending is downbeat. The wife thinks the cat got him. End of cat is implied. But there is no feline autopsy to be sure, as recommended by the fraternity brothers. She moves out of the house leaving the ever diminishing Grant to his fate in the basement wilderness. It is inhospitable enough to be Mars or New Jersey to mini-Grant.
There are fine setups and shots of the kind that made director Jack Arnold’s name. The performances are exact. The special effects work. There are two sidebars that illustrate the downward spiral that Grant is in. There are no villains to make it black and white.
It is a character study. This happens and the is how people react.
When the Hollywood remake comes, it can star Tom Midget. No special effects will be needed.
In a masochistic effort to watch all the many freely available John Agar movies so that I might have ontological dinner party bragging rights, I tried to watch ‘The Attack of the Puppet People’ (1958) but found the sludge so deep that I became mired, and instead read about it and to discover it was an imitation of ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man,’ which had much better reviews so I had a look and I am glad I did.
I find slipping the word ‘ontological’ gratuitously into a conversation usually stops the quibbles.
The fraternity brothers mainly slept through this one. ‘Too wordy,’ one of them drooled. ‘A house cat does not make a Creature Feature,’ muttered another.

IMDb meta-data is: 1 hour and 54 minutes of Dali time, rated at 5.6 by 64,947 cinemitizens
Verdict: Morons on Mars in a pastiche of previous films.

Verdict: As always, Roger Ebert nailed it: A hundred million dollar production with a ten cent script. Think what NASA could do with that money. Plus it is double sappy.
It is a Mars rescue mission that ends with comic book CGI. The players try, but well it gets trying.
In 2020, a mere two years from now, all is peace and harmony on Earth (as if) and the World Space Program sends Dan Cheadle with three others to land on Mars, and where they quickly prove they were never Boy or Girl Scouts.
1. All four of them ride around Mars together in their jeep, leaving no one in reserve back at base.
2. They stand motionless when the storm breaks rather than taking cover, or getting in the vehicle and scooting.
3. Motionless, they also stand close enough together for one CGI rock to finish three of them. ‘Spread out,’ those are often words of sergeant wisdom.
4. Moreover, none of them notices the very conspicuous white protrusion on the top left of the hill that then spits dirt at them. Even the fraternity brothers noticed that.
One of the four survives, and by the way, we never find out how or why, though he refers to himself as having been spared, and that implies selection. Now he has to be rescued.
Of course he will be. There is none of the technical, social, or political dimensions to this undertaking that are set out better in ‘The Martian’ (2016). Cheadle’s wife is never informed of either the deaths or his survival. Yet she and many other wives are much in evidence in the opening barbecue derived from ‘Apollo 13’ (1995). Thereafter she and they are forgotten. In the credits they are styled ‘NASA wife 1,’ ‘NASA wife 2,’ and so on. The high horse sighed: every character in a Sam Peckinpah movie always had a name. Every character actor in a Frank Capra movie had screen time, else why have them. Not so here. Might as well have been CGIed.
Oh, except for the wife who goes on the mission as half of a married couple. Sure that would be NASA policy. For fun read the acknowledgement of NASA in the terminal credits, and then try to figure out what the convoluted wording means.
The scriptwriter’s old friend, the meteor puts in an appearance at the most (in)opportune time. Bang. Equally predictable these days are the product placements that feature on the NASA hardware. Likewise to be expected is the piteous piling up of a tear-jerker back story, about a dead wife, though we find out nothing about her, she is much displayed as eye candy.
The rescue mission is a failure and lands three astronauts with no gear, equipment, or good dialogue. Their situation is desperate from the get-go and they are there to find Don, if he is still alive. Pressure. Pressure. Pressure. So what do they do first? Well, on behalf of the World Space Mission that sent them they plant a USA flag. Not kidding. That is what they do.
On Mars there is evidently plenty of water because all the actors stay shaved and clean. And the weather isn’t bad since the ripped up and open to the elements tent has green growing plants in it in Mars’s atmosphere, enough to feed them all. Green cheese is shipped in from the Moon to stock up the fridge.By the by the temperature on Mars at this moment is -100F, per the NASA Orion web site.
In a screenplay full of inane lines said with the self-importance of Hollywood, the prize goes to Don who buried his fallen comrades. Well, he dug and marked three graves but he only found one body, but ‘it didn’t seem right’ to make only one grave. Huh? Burn those calories. By the way, Don asks not one word of his wife back on the Earth, despite all the sap about the other two wives. OK, if he did, it was so incidental I missed it.
There is great photography and CGI special effects, including a tribute or two to ‘Space Odyssey 2001,’ the mandatory scenes of weightlessness, and an EVA. Although each is drawn out and out and out striving for epic length, when the additional footage adds nothing.
Spoiler ahead. The enigmatic face and the DNA are interesting and arresting, but they come so late and are trivialised into a comic book take. The alien DVD on evolution would make Disney blush, so lame is it. On the bright side, it would get the film banned in Alabama.
In another repetition of a previous film(s), our hero says he didn’t come this far to turn back now. An astronaut has to …. That he was on a one-way ticket was telegraphed for more than 90 minutes. Even the fraternity brothers got that message through the fog that envelops them.
The end.
For those who like mysteries, figure out how the surviving widow got the neck chain off her dead husband, floating in space out of reach, so that she could later give it to our hero.
Like other entries in the current Mars industry, it was filmed in Jordan. No doubt the Jordan Tourist Board remains hard at work in the Mars industry with its red lens filters.

IMDb meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 11 minutes of purgatory, rated far too high at 2.9 by 551 misguided cinemitizens.
Verdict: there is no curse, no swamp, and a creature in a rubber mask only appears in the last five minutes when all hope for diversion had long been abandoned.
Sick green seemed the right colour choice.
Three local villains in East Texas hope to trick geologist John Agar into finding undiscovered subsurface oil.  The trio together score 99 are the Stanford-Binet IQ test.
The catatonic Agar will make said discovery by drifting in a flat bottomed boat along the Red River, calling it a swamp. 
Deep within the ersatz swamp there is a wanna be mad scientist, Dr Dope, and his curvy wife, whom he keeps locked in a room so that she does not interfere with his research. This order of priorities baffled the fraternity brothers, as much does.
By the use of a dry ice bath Dope is trying to transmute individuals into a über creatures with the power to overcome maxed credit cards. His test subjects come from the local village.  So far he has failed and he disposes of the bodies of his fails by feeding them to a swimming pool full of alligators. ‘Do alligators like chlorine,’ asked fraternity brothers?
Needing more unwilling specimens, Dope invites the geological exploration party of four to stay overnight in his house. Being lower case dopes, the accept. The dialogue of this soiree is so painfully inept that even the fraternity brothers cringed.
Meanwhile, the local villagers have noticed the decrease in their number and in response play bongo drums. A lot. Then some more. Having got that out of their systems, they dress up in face paint and hang Dr Dope in effigy.  By this heap big medicine they hope to stop his inroads into to their number. Must be anti-vaxxers. That is colourful but….they decide torches would better thanks to the advice of a consultant in D-Movie schlock.  They organise an angry mob of outraged villagers and…[tension does not mount].
Now that the members of the geological party are asleep on the floor of Dope’s one-room mansion, he selects the conniving woman in the party as his next specimen, syringe to the ready.  Dipped into the dry ice bath, she’s dons the rubber mask with ping pong ball eyes. It is an unexpected and unexplained move for him to select the woman of the group. What does that do to the staples of Creature Features? Namely the creature caring off the babe.
When she comes to life, Dope siccs her on the approaching mob.  Sicks, indeed.  Agar, who barely knows her, appeals to her humanity, she who conspired in the earlier murder of an oilman, and must have been planning Agar’s demise.  Had he not read the script? Well, that appeal didn’t work.
The resourceful Agar then tells her she is a monster because of Dr Dope! Good one! She turns on Dope. They struggle and together fall into the alligator pool.  We see again for the fourth, or was if the fifth time, stock footage of feeding time at a zoo.
The production values are a film school fail.  The mansion is just a house. When Dope drugs the woman he carries a pillow which is supposed to be her back through the living room where the three men in the geological party are sleeping on the floor, kicking and tripping over them, but they sleep on. Sure. Tired out after floating all day.
Yet they are later roused by noises from the very sedate mob. Speaking of that mob, what losers!
The mob comes with torches. With torches! Come on! This is Texas! Where are the AK-47s?  
Credit, such as is due, the fact that there are black faces in this production.  They are the VooDooing villagers whose dwindling number provided Dope’s unwilling specimens when out after dark.  His only henchman is also black.
One drooling NRA member of the geological party assaults a young black women who works as a maid in the mansion and she out smarts him.  Good! But not a high bar, outsmarting him. 
This is another entry in the Texas film industry from the ego and bankroll of Larry Buchanan whose literal re-make of ‘Zontar: The Thing from Venus’ (1966) set a new standard for zero. It, too, featured Agar. Who else would do it? It was even worse than the tiresome original. Both Zontar pictures are reviewed elsewhere on this blog. ‘Read at your own risk.’
Admission: I watched it because I thought it related to ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon’ (1954) and his several misadventures in Florida.  Wrong!
Sad to say that this is not the end. There followed: ‘Curse of the Swamp Creature’ (1994) and ‘Curse of the Swamp Creature 2’ (1997). I have not yet had the courage to find out any more about them.

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 18 minutes, rated 5.8 by 2358 mouth-breathers.

The IMDb summary says the Creature escapes and starts killing! ‘Not so,’ cries Perry Mason. Despite the paltry rating by the fraternity brothers, this is a thoughtful rekindling of the franchise of ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon’ (1954) and a welcome improvement on the previous sequel, ‘The Revenge of the Creature’ (1955). Both are subjected to rigorous commentary elsewhere on this blog.
This, the final entry for the Creature. starts with two advantages. It does not star John Agar. Jeff Morrow and Rex Reason lead the cast here. In addition, there is a screenplay with some ideas in it that are developed.
The set up is this. Jeff is a wealthy medical doctor with a trophy wife, who provides the bathing beauty scenes and little else. Jeff, somehow, has studied the traces of the Gill Man, as the Creature is now styled, and has leapt to several conclusions. First is that the Gill Man can be surgically altered to breath just like us to live out of water (so he can walk among us). Second, with his extraordinary strength and endurance Gill Man can lead us to the stars! What, go to Hollywood? No, he means it literally, by using Gill Man we can create a superior race who can survive spaceflight and conquer the universe. ‘Jeff, call Elon Musk!’
The fraternity brothers wondered about how this procreating was going to work. Always the same with these bottom feeders.
Rex is taken aback by this divine agenda, since he signed on, being himself a medical scientist, to study the Creature in a controlled environment. He means the Creature no ill; unlike Jeff who wants to cut-and-paste him into … Flesh Gordon,
This polarity is one of the continuing themes, the discussion of which bored the fraternity brothers. Another is the deteriorating relationship between Mr and Mrs Jeff. Every time he tells her not to do something, off she goes to do it. Learning nothing from experience, Jeff keeps telling her what not to do. She shoots sharks for fun. She dives too deep to show off. She flounces around in revealing costumes. She drinks. All very 1950s.
The hired hands notice her, and press their attentions on her. She is not interested in them, but Rex, now that is another chin. He however is ever so correct.
Jeff is all soft spoken, but — as always — he looks worried. Could be the Amex bill he has run up in hiring a cabin cruiser the size of the Titanic and sailing it from San Francisco to the Gulf of Mexico and back with a crew of hired hands to ogle Mrs.
These two governing narratives are set forth with brisk economy in the first fifteen minutes. There follows a lot of padding to reach a respectable length.
Off they go a-Creature hunting, five men in a row boat the size of dinner plate. Best time to find the elusive creature in the swamp is at night, right? With plenty of gas for the two-stroke motor and torches to light the way. He finds them first and attacks. In the melée he is set on fire and rendered unconscious. They capture him. The burns reveal a second underlying skin much like ours. A nip and tuck here and there and he can breath air and walk among us.
He is a modest Creature and the hired hands dress him in some size XXXXXXXL pyjamas. This dressing occurs off camera so the Creature retains mystique.
As he recovers consciousness the Creature is unsure and then makes a break for the water. In he goes, only to discover he is now gill-less and drowns. ‘Cut.’ cried the director. ‘If he dies… we have no movie!’ On cue, Rex and his chin dive in with an oxygen line and save the Creature.
Once in Sausalito Jeff pens the Creature in a stockade with an electric fence. The Creature broods for the water seen in the distance. Rex feels sorry for him, and suggests….well, nothing. He doesn’t feel that sorry. Mrs flounces around in a huff. Jeff still has stars in his eyes.
Hired Hand again tries his hand on Mrs, who again pushes him away. Jeff yet again observes and though he blames Mrs for drawing attention to herself, he grows enraged with Hired Hand and clonks him to death. Gulp! What to do? Thinks, Jeff, ‘I will blame HH’s death on the Creature.’ Little Jeff carries the big hunk of Hired Hand to the pen, turns off the juice, and throws the corpse at the Creature’s feet. How the starry dreamer has fallen to the jungle.
The Creature is confused and lashes out at Jeff who falls over his script. Now the Creature pursues Jeff through the mansion. In ransacking the house to find Jeff, the Creature comes across Mrs, who cowers per the director’s orders, and noble Rex and his chin interpose themselves in front of her. The Creature pauses to look at them. Looking…..
Then he turns away. He has no quarrel with them. Rex and his chin saved him, and Mrs can swim up an eyeful. He goes after Jeff. He finds Jeff. End of Jeff. Jeff, his tormentor and captor is his only victim. By the way no ‘City Screams in Terror’ per the lobby card since all of this action takes place in a rich man’s private compound away from prying eyes.
Then, searching for Virginia Woolf, the Creature walks into the sea. The End. There is no fourth entry in the series.
As Jeff’s marriage failed he reverts to the primitive man who clubs his rival to death and then blames the hapless Creature. Get it? He starts out a star gazer and ends a cave man.
By the way, Jeff and Rex met earlier in ‘This Island Earth’ (1955), reviewed elsewhere on this blog. Jeff had the white hair, and parked his UFO under Rex’s chin.
The underwater photography is technically proficient but it is only eye candy in this outing, not integral to the story. Indeed there is a lot of padding in this execution. While this screenplay is preferable to that of ‘The Revenge of the Creature,’ the scientists make no effort to establish any rapport with the creature or to communicate with him on any level. Not even the word ‘Stop.’

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 22 minutes of treacle time, rated 5.6 by 4432 cinemitizens.
Verdict: A major disappointment.

While ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon’ (1954) had atmosphere, tension, humour, likeable characters, elegant photography, and — most of all— humanity. This sequel from much the same production crew has few, if any, of those qualities. While it still shows some of touches of director Jack Arnold, they are bleached by the inept screenplay.
Some films can be saved by the actors but not in this case. This was the first of fifty B movie creature features/Sy Fy movies that would largely constitute John Agar’s subsequent career. At this stage he was still trying to be an A picture leading man, and not yet sleepwalking in his trademark catatonic style developed later. He is really trying, and very annoying, and so superficial that the fraternity brothers rooted for the Creature.
Not even a pay-check, a director, a screen-play, and a career motivated the ichthyologist to warm to Agar. No rapport puts it mildly. While required to embrace and kiss him, the viewer can see the icicles.
While dead at the end of the marvellous ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon’ in the previous year, by the miracle of modern medical screenplay writing the Creature is restored to life in the Black Lagoon. The first fifteen minutes consists of his capture. Nestor Pavia, the only hold over from the original, captains the boat with his usual panache.
While Richards Carlson and Denning could not quell the Creature in the original, Bozos One and Two dynamite the lagoon on the assumption either they will kill Creature and take him back for dissection, or knock him unconscious so they can send him home for torture.
This approach alone indicates the Channel 7Mate intellectual level of what follows. Kaboom!
Once captured Creature is put on display for gawkers at Ocean Harbor in sun-bright Florida. There Agar and Ichthie torture him with food and cattle prods. Yep. Several times. Repeatedly. Their aim is to teach him to stop on the word ‘Stop.’ High level science it is. The fraternity brothers called the SPCA.
Ichthie and Agar exchange frozen lips now and then. The fraternity brothers know those kisses for the brush-off they are.
Creature has enough of their prodding and does some of his own. He kills Bozo One in the melée and escapes with ease since no precautions were taken, per the screenplay.
Though Bozo One was well known to both Agar and Ichthie neither misses a beat at his death. Just as neither gives a thought to Creature’s plight at the end of the cattle prod. (Yes, I know, Ichthie once says ‘she almost feels sorry for him.’ Put the emphasis on ‘almost.’ That means she does not feel sorry for him.)
(The next time cattle prods were on screen they were used by Bull Connor’s police in Birmingham on protestors.)
The opportunities lost were many. One of the strengths of the original was the underwater photography and the swimming of the stuntman, Ricou Browning, who is also in this one. There is some imitation of the original and Arnold’s touch shows in it, but it is not integrated into the insipid story. Moreover, once in Florida’s glare the mystery of the Black Lagoon is gone. There is another Arnold-moment when the peeping and stalking Creature is transfixed by the sight of Ichthie in her boudoir. But again it is cut before it sinks in.
In the aquarium there are some nicely framed shots from the water into the viewing area and the reverse that could have used for communion if not communication between the two worlds, but not so. The potential is palpable, but left at as a showy camera shot, not integrated into the story.

The Wiki word is that despite the commercial success of the original, the studio cut the budget for this reprise to the bone, because of losses on other pictures. The McKinsey managers’ assumption was, as is often the case and often right, the audience would be too stupid to notice. Considering the undeserved high score on the IMDb maybe they were right in the long run.
Whereas in the original the deaths of associates were shocking and disturbing, in this one it is not even clear to this inattentive viewer, ahem, if Agar and Ichthie realise Bozo was torn apart. Instead they go out on a dinner-dance date. Indeed they show no interest in the escaped Creature and feel no responsibility for anything. ‘Don’t blame them; they written that way.’
Now the Creature has no trouble spotting Ichthie and puts his moves on her. The de rigueur scene of the Creature Feature lobby card occurs as he carries her off into the night. Where promptly he puts her down. Must be heavier than she looks.
In the end Creature obeys Agar’s command to stop, so that the assembled NRA members can shoot him down. Another triumph for US foreign policy. See something foreign, shoot it.
The end.
Maybe Creature is the only sympathetic character in this soup because he does not have to speak any of the tepid and dreary lines of the screenplay. Silent and brooding with such underwater grace and agility, he embodies a personality none of the dry players can match.
A recurrent theme in Jack Arnold’s movies is the situation of women professionals, career and family. It is here in some dialogue but so poorly executed one suspects Arnold inserted it and the screen writer made no effort to integrate it. Still Ichthie does muse on her choice as a career woman and where will it lead, when most of her gal pals are now married with children. Agar ignores these concerns, per the mores of the time.

Perhaps the only thing that makes the movie worth watching for anyone who is not a copper-bottomed Sy Fyian is that it is Clint Eastwood’s film debut. He has thirty-seconds as a lab technician in the early going.