Category: Film Review

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 38 minutes, rated 5.8 by a horde of 20237 cinemitizens.
Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: ‘Max, you shouldn’t have done that.’
The set-up. At some point in the distant future a space exploration vehicle is in ‘search of habitable people,’ declares Dr Weena. Don’t blame her. She says the line written for her.
Still maybe that line makes sense considering that Norman Bates is in the crew, along with Nick Tana and Quinton McHale. Stop there. McHale is woefully miscast as the geriatric but ambitious reporter for a newspaper that still exists in this far distant future. Which is the worse blunder? That McHale is still at work, or that newspapers are still in print? (Yes, I have fond memories of ‘Marty’ [1955] before he went into the navy. Say no more.)
To prepare for this mission, Weena has had her eyebrows plucked into perfect arcs. Is that significant? We’ll never know.
Way out there they encounter a very colourful black hole. It is not black at all, despite what people say. And nearby is a Very Big Space Ship designed like the Pompidou Centre, i.e., badly. Inside the VBSS is Franz von Gerlach who is still in hiding. Having learned nothing in Altona he has committed more crimes, and plans still more. There is no keeping a good war criminal down.

To aid him Franz has Red Max clanking around.
Franz has plans for these hapless wayfarers but first he has to charm them with his Viennese accent, and play hide-and-seek behind his Moses beard, lent to him by Chest Heston. Franz is completely nuts and so naturally Norman signs up with him to enter the black hole which isn’t black. Quoting Martin Heidegger, he says that it is a portal to transcendence or something. At merest mention of Heidegger, the fraternity brothers fell asleep, and why not. This is the giant mind who once said ‘clarity is suicide for philosophy.’ There was never any danger of suicide in his case.
For reasons the fraternity brothers missed, Franz will not let the travellers go. Why he needs this crew is anyone’s guess. Shoot ‘em up ensues….for about thirty minutes. Fortunately, Franz’s hench-robots stand perfectly still in the fire fights and go down like [censored]. I would like to say that they all vanish down the rabbit hole, oops, the black hole, but not quite. The end has to be seen to be believed. Just think, someone wrote that. Just think someone paid them for writing it. Refer to the tag line above about Max.
This was a Disney production, touted as the first Disney film to be aimed at grown-ups. Ah huh. To this observer it is ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ with Pac Man. The set designs, stunts, the cosmos as it appears out of the bay windows on the VBSS are all fine. Red Max is pretty clearly something to avoid at all times.
If one can overlook, McHale, Weena’s eye brows, Norman, and the beard, well, then the acting is good. Nick Tana is as always in focus. Franz had long experience at being nuts, and does it effortlessly, though why the beard was a question that preoccupied the fraternity brothers. His chin isn’t that weak.
But really, Max, you shouldn’t have done it.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 14 minutes, rated a generous 5.8 by 571 insomniacs.
Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: Don’t.
A decade after Star Trek Gene Roddenberry tried again with this pilot for a television series. In design and context, it recalls its predecessor, ditto in being didactic and talky. We even have a combination Vulcan mind meld grip.
But to get to the story. Rip van Carmine Orrico awakens after a long nap to the Twenty-second century where the Planet Earth is recovering ever so slowly from the Republican Apocalypse. He is among civilised Pax scientists who go around dissecting anything and everything. So advanced is their science that they fit him with a hair piece that stays in place.
Elsewhere on Planet Earth are roving bands and isolated enclaves of Mormons, Chicago Cub fans, Mad Maxxers, Vegans, Esperantoists, Tea Partiers, and other nut cases. It is dangerous out there!
The chief gimmick is that only the Paxxers have Opal cards for the metro underground that is everywhere, so they can take the train to adventure. It is every rail commuters dream to have the train system all to oneself! No one on Town Hall Station platforms but thee! Hallelujah!
One of Pax’s top scientists has gone missing and Carmine with Lurch, a petite woman, and an albino set out to find him. This crew would stand-out even on King Street Newtown on Saturday night.
Lurch keeps knocking his head on door lintels. The little woman falls down on cue. The Albino is so weak he has to sit on it.
Only Carmine is up to it. Is he ever! No stunt man is safe from his stunt double as he punches, shoots, kicks, wallops, blasts, and jabs. All the while, the hair piece stays in place. Amazing. Awesome.
Then he falls into the hands of Diana Muldaur. ‘Lucky him,’ said the fraternity brothers. She can make ‘Hello’ sound like both an insult and an invitation. She lives in a community of über liberated women who have enslaved men, and Carmine is just another hunk. He is a slow learner and has to be beaten into submission. Protected by the script sewn into his clothing, he is tough and they run out of whips. There is talk of breeding…..and, the fraternity brothers started to pay attention. But it is only talk.
Meanwhile, the Mad Maxxers draw nearer. And so on and on…. The fraternity brothers fell asleep and their soporific sounds….. Confession: We did not make it to the end.
The script is paper thin! Ha! Ha! That is despite the fact that the writing credit goes to ‘Rockford Files’ wordsmith Juanita Bartlett. And the direction is turgid though credited to Star Trek journeyman Marc Daniels, and produced by another ST veteran, Robert Justman. It is a good team, but this time there no air in the ball.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour even, over-rated 4.0 by 971 masochists.

Genre: Sy Fy and Snooze
Verdict: No brains were eaten in the making of this movie. Nor were any used.

In Illinois farmland a silo appears. Well, a cone. There were already plenty of silos but no one notices them.
The cone sits there. Cone sitting.
Anticipating a plague of Cone Heads, a loud mouth Senator in Washington is granted executive authority by the President, who did neither constitutional law nor political science, to deal with the cone.
Big Mouth goes to Illinois and orders everyone around. Yawn, went the fraternity brothers. Ed crawls into the cone and finds nothing. The mystery deepens.
Meanwhile there have been three or more murders in the nearby small town. Huh? We see one in the opening sequence. A few people run around with a glowing basketball tucked under their coats. Hoosierland is indeed hoop country.
See.
There is one excellent scene early in the mayor’s office where he behaves oddly. Very. It is very well shot, a la Orson Wells, askew. Mayor goes ballistic. Literally. With a gun. Something is wrong! Got it. This scene is very well acted by the distraught mayor and nicely filmed. Much better than anything else in the picture. So much so, the fraternity brothers wondered if it was excerpted from another movie. The more so, since we never see or hear of the mayor again. Perhaps he was desperate to escape the rest of this movie. A wise man he proved to be.
More milling around and yelling occurs. Big Mouth makes many telephone calls, sends telegrams, tells a…. Ooops. No one replies to his missives. That cannot be right, he yells. I am too important to be ignored! Really? Think so?
Meanwhile the clock is ticking. Ever so slowly.
They realise the cone, which has been the focus of such attention as there has been, is a decoy. The real threat is elsewhere. Quick on the uptake, not. The attackers are moles from underground, not aliens from the stars. Huh! So that flash of light at the start was…a blown bulb, or what.
Meanwhile more and more people adopt the Quasimodo look. Finally there is a confrontation with Mr Spock, a noble suicide, a crashing bore, and the end.

Mr Spock is credited as Leonard Nemoy. Ah huh. He got the last laugh.
The inference is that the glowing basketballs were eggs and when they hatch the tribbles that emerge fasten onto the nearest human spinal column and munch away. The infected human becomes a soulless automaton perfect for attending McKinsey management training seminars ad nauseam.
There is intrusive narration. When our heroes go to the telegraph office, the voice over tells us that they are at the telegraph office in case we missed the big sign that said ‘Telegraph Office.’ And so on. Perhaps that was a service for blind members of the audience. The use of such voice overs rather than dialogue indicates the lack of sound technician. One of the many lacks in this case.
Without a doubt it is derived from Robert Heinlein’s Sy Fy novel ‘The Puppet Masters’ (1951). Heinlein sued and settled out of court. Executive Producer Roger Corman agreed, says the web gossip, to buy the screen rights to two Heinlein books and not to put Heinlein’s name anywhere near this one. Corman did not use the rights he bought. That is very unlike Mr Tightwad. It took another forty years for ‘The Puppet Masters’ to be filmed, as reviewed elsewhere on this blog.

IMDb runtime is 1 hour and 49 minutes, rated 5.9 by 7552 cinemitizens.
Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: Des Moines never looked better
In a small town in Iowa, but not blue-eyed Riceville, a spaceship lands and thereafter everyone is as dead-eyed as a born again Republican. They lose interest in sex and, believe it or not, in football!
The Masters proliferate at an alarming rate endangering the future of the Iowa caucus. To avert that catastrophe the resources of the distant and oppressive Federal government are mobilised in the person of a Canadian. Huh! Go with it.
The Masters attach themselves to the backs of victims, who seem to enjoy the experience, without leaving a wrinkle in a shirt or a hump under a blouse. Amazing.
The first fifteen minutes are whiz bang. The ship lands. Teenage boys find it. A baseball bat figures. Next thing you know everyone in town has a Master. The Feds come to check and shoot ‘em erupts in the local television station’s office.
After that rattling start the pace slows, and slows, and slows, punctuated by gratuitous fisticuffs, shoot ‘em ups, and chases that go around in circles. Regrettably it does not feature the (infamous) Des Moines Sky Walk, about which more below.
The Masters turn hosts into automatons who hate immigrants, blacks, homosexuals, success, table manners, Democrats, and good sense. Hmmm.
While there are two scenes where communication occurs between a Master and a man, these aliens seem to have no program. They are there to destroy, not to do anything more. Many have concluded that they were Republicans. I couldn’t possibly say. They make no plea that they have to do this to survive, that their home world has or is going to perish, that they bought Earth in good faith at a Milky Way real estate auction, that God told them to do it, that their KPIs require it, or any of the other standard tropes of the genre. In this respect the Masters fall short of ‘Teenagers from Outer Space’ (1959) who came to farm lobsters, a film reviewed elsewhere on this blog, hidden in a collective comment on several films. Search away. Or for that matter, ‘The Lobster Man from Mars’ (1989) who came to steal oxygen, also reviewed on this blog. Get to clicking to find it.
I cannot remember the book, which I read as a teenager, well enough to add anything sensible. ‘Guffaw,’ went the fraternity brothers. Right on cue. [Subsequent note, I did try to re-read after drafting these words of wisdom but found its 1950s machismo hard going. It reminded me vaguely of the stories in men’s magazines of the era in barbershops.]
The film is repetitive and violent and the FBI warning contains the following note. The film has ‘violence, gore, and BRIEF LANGUAGE.’ Yep. That put the fraternity brothers on high alert. Violence? Check. Gore? Check. But, whoa, brief language? Nope. There is a lot of yapping.
There is much running around in Des Moines car parks and the city hall environs. The energy is high; the meaning is low; the character development is zero. Muscle is supposed to be Canadian’s alienated son. ‘So what,’ asked the fraternity brothers. Good question, since we never do find out what to make of that except that Canadian wears Armani suits. There is sex interest in an exo-biologist but there is neither spark nor sparkle there. Linda Fiorentino would have burned a hole in the screen in that role, but this player is bland on bland. By the way, Keith David nearly steals the show in a supporting role. Don’t blame him for the final turn which came from the writer and the director, not the player.

Likewise, Will Patton, as the nerd boy who figures a lot of it out, is a pleasure to watch.

But we don’t get a lot of thinking in this slam-blam adaptation. Yaphet Kotto is entirely wasted as an empty uniform.
Sometimes killing the host kills the parasite and other times it does not. Mostly it does not, but when the parasite ridden bodyguards of the President are mowed down, the parasites go quietly. That puzzled the fraternity brothers, briefly. Nothing stays with them long.
The stunt work is fabulous with nary a CGI in sight. The night para-glide into the heart of darkest, alien infested downtown Des Moines was great fun. But once there it is the same old, same old. The running, jumping, falling, fighting, shooting was masterful if one wants it. But after the fourth or fifth time with no forward progress in the story or the people, well, who cares.
While the critics linked to the IMDb comment on the small budget, it seems to be large and talented cast with plenty of money for stunt work. The list of stunt men and women acknowledged in the credits rolls on and on.
The story comes from Robert Heinlein’s 1951 novel, in which it is clear that the parasites are Commies sapping the vital red, white, and blue juices from Americans who are too dumb to know that they are being drained. Heinlein has a claim to be the Dean of Sy Fy in the 1950s. He was an Arctic Cold Warrior – seeing reds as slugs, bugs, and cruds. Slugs in this outing. Bugs in ‘Starship Troopers.’ And cruds in ‘Red Planet.’ And under every bed, disguised as dust bunnies.
The patience of readers to this point is rewarded with a comment on the Des Moines SkyWalk.

It was built in the 1970s to allow downtown office workers to traverse its four miles of elevated walk ways in comfort, out of the weather of the Great Plains. It connects to several large car parking garages, a bus exchange, office blocks, city hall, retail malls, a sports complex, hotels, and is dotted with cafés, fast food franchise, laundries, and the like. It served two purposes, one, to keep jobs in the downtown area rather than in outlying business and industrial parks, and, two, to attract companies to locate in Des Moines.
We used the SkyWalk in Des Moines and learned a sad lesson. Everywhere else in the known world North is always at the top of a map. Not so in Des Moines. When we paced the SkyWalk we saw helpful, illuminated maps at every junction and read these to navigate. BIG MISTAKE. Soon we were going around in circles and off course. Why? How could this be? We looked more closely at the maps, one after another. On some North was at the top, where it should be. But on others it was to the right, or left, or a diagonal, or at the bottom. No two consecutive junction maps had the same orientation. Believe it or not, Ripley!
The maps were useless to outsiders. And no doubt were never consulted by locals. While there is some information on the SkyWalk to be found on the internet none of it addresses this fundamental point. Is it any wonder that no famous explorer ever came from Iowa? Couldn’t find north.
There is an app. Wonder where north is on it? No plan to find out.
While the RÉSO in Montréal has far fewer maps, they are consistent and put the true North, strong, brave, and free where it should be.
It seems the SkyWalk has kept jobs in the downtown, about 75,000 of them according to the Chamber of Commerce, and in so doing has brought new opportunities to Des Moines. It has also obeyed the law of unintended consequences and nearly destroyed street level commerce. Everyone uses the SkyWalk in preference to the street. There are virtually no walk-ins to businesses on the streets. The space for businesses on the SkyWalk is much less than on the street, so the net effect is to squeeze out small businesses from downtown.
So it is said. I would say Iowans are going around and around on the SkyWalk because they cannot find north.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 9 minutes, rated at paltry 7.2 by 9211 cinemitizens. Released on 30 April 1943.
Genres: Horror, Drama

Verdict: Jane Eyre in the West Indies.
On a blustery day of snow and wind in frozen Ottawa a pert young nurse is offered a post on a tropical island at a good rate of pay, expressed in dollars.* Off Nurse goes to San Sebastien where she meets the half-brothers Smooth and Touchy. Her assignment is to look after Mrs Smooth. ‘An invalid?’ she asked. No….. She meets Mrs later that night as a hot wind stirs the palm trees and rustles the cane fields. Disturbed by the sound of crying, Nurse finds the sleepwalking Mrs in a spooky tower.
There is tension between the brothers and it seems to relate to Mrs. James Bell gives an Oscar-worthy performance as the local doctor who mediates between medical science and the voodoo gods. The ambiguity remains throughout.
Smooth says that his family is cursed by its history as slavers. He is as morose on this island paradise as a doomed, grey man in the Nordic ice fields written by Henrik Ibsen, bearing the sins of his fathers. While Touchy defers to Smooth as the elder brother and as manager of the cane plantation, he assiduously undermines him. (Reminds me of so many people I have worked with in that passive-aggressive mien.)
The slave past remains in the local culture. When a baby is born the blacks cry for the pain and grief of slavery it will endure. Death is a time to celebrate release from those pains.
There is one creepy segment in a sugar cane field at night.

This episode might be the most memorable in the film, especially the line, ‘She does not bleed.’
A number of blacks populate the scenes, mostly in the background. But the crooner has some very pointed lyrics, delivered twice. He is credited as Sir Lancelot, born Lancelot Victor Edward Pinard and raised in New York City. Theresa Harris lights up the screen as Alma, who knows far more than she says. She has more than a hundred films on the IMDb, often uncredited and inevitably as a maid. Darby Jones

was cast for his bug eyes yet he remains dignified. He made a career out of jungle movies. The dancer who compels Mrs is the dynamic Jieno Moxzer. This is one of only two credits on the IMDb. Our loss.
None of the blacks is reduced to the comic stereotype so tiresomely common at the time in movies. That in itself is noteworthy. Added to that is the guilt of slavery articulated by Smooth, and it is a surprise package. Though there are some disparaging remarks in the script that irritated the fraternity brothers.
The screenplay is by Curt Siodmak, he of a long list of Sy Fy and Horror credits, and Ardel Wray. Some of the internet opinionators argue, well, assert, that the story is unusual for Siodmak. Not so sure myself. The air of menace, showing rather than telling, the concentric circle of stories are all motifs Siodmak used. But there is no doubt this one has emotional depth that may have come from Ardel Wray.

She, by the way, for refusing to rat people out was grey-listed during the Witch Hunts a few years later. Ergo her film credits are few. Grey-listing led her to work as a reader and editor in the back office at Warner Brothers. No longer getting screen credits kept her profile low.
After the debacle of Citizen Orson Wells at RKO, the studio was in dire financial straits. It was imperative to get revenue and there was little or no money. Val Lewton was appointed head of the B-Movie unit at RKO and he was handed a backlog of properties with deadlines for completing them. The KPI was $.
Val Lewton
Most of these properties were short stories, which had been purchased to get the titles, not the narrative, in the way that one today might purchase an internet domain to get the name, not the content. He then assigned titles to writers to produce screenplays quick-smart. Likewise he had to work with directors, technicians, and actors already on contract.
This film is one result. It was made on a micro-budget but with clever lighting, accomplished camera work, skilled editing, and brisk direction, it looks like an A-movie. Much of the credit for all the preceding qualities has to go to the director, Jacques Tourneur. His other credits include ‘Cat People’ (1942), ‘Leopard Man’ (1943), and ‘Out of the Past’ (1947). Winners all. He specialised in film noir. He, too, suffered from the Witch Hunts of the time, finding it opportune to return to his native France for extended vacations at times.
Though barely more than an hour long it is chocked full of characters and incidents, each carefully defined. Yet it does not seem rushed or crowded. It is another exhibit for a masterclass on film-making.
*One quibble though, it was only in 1949, per the fount of Wikipedia, that Canada introduced its dollar to replace the British pound.
Careful viewers will note that as the opening titles roll there is a disclaimer that ‘any similarity to any persons living, dead, or POSSESSED, is entirely coincidental.’ I put the capitals in for emphasis.

IMDb meta-data is run time a snappy 1 hour and 1 minute, rated 6.2 by 151 cinemitizens.
Released on 1 December 1944.
Genre: Noir, Comedy.

Verdict: All singing, all dancing gal pals do what has to be done.
To dispel superstitions about a mansion where a murder took place twenty years ago, the family puts on a party for family and friends. As the guests gather and cavort, the upstairs Blue Room, where the deed occurred is nonetheless kept locked.
Brash, a young suitor for Daughter, insists that he spend the night in the Blue Room to prove it is safe. This kNight errant hopes to win patronal favour for his matrimonial suit by this exploit. Sure, that is understood but safe from what?
Thereafter the plot thickens. The next morning, though the bell in the Blue Room rings for the butler, no one is there in the Blue Room when the ever typecast butler Edwards enters. Bernie OIds on loan from countless other cop shows, comes to investigate but makes no progress, apart from chewing on a toothpick. Brash has disappeared.
The sleuthing is taken over by the three Jazzy-belles on hand to entertain the guests. These wisecracking gal pals mix song with inference and dance with investigation. They are amusing. The music has zest. The dancing is Olympic standards. Very diverting. All so much better than say the Ritz Brothers, originally contracted for this film before they got a better offer.
Needless to say there is a villain, and it is a he, the one least suspicious. Of course.
For once Ian Wolfe as the eternal butler gets some good lines and moments on camera, and he makes the most of them.
The Jazzy-belles carry the picture, a scratch group assembled for this film, it seems: Grace McDonald, Betty Kean, and June Preisser. Two of them had short careers but McDonald continued in television into the 1980s.

A rarity then for the time with these three as the principal players.
The screenplay confused the fraternity brothers. At one point, speaking of the death in the Blue Room, a member of the family says no one knows how the victim, her father, died. Later her brother says their father was shot. In both cases the attending physician is present along with several others. Throughout there is friendly ghost in attendance who is not integrated into the story but is there for comic irritation.
As this film made it way across the country, the newsreels that preceded it would have carried the news of the enormous and ominous reverses Allied Armies began to suffer in the Battle of Bulge.

IMDb meta-data is runtime a brisk 1 hour and 18 minutes, rated at 6.5 by 1155 cinemitizens.
Genre: Noir, Mystery

Verdict: Noir at its best.
Babe is a two-year widow who starts hearing his dead husband’s voice in the air without a BlueTooth headset. Oh Oh. This irritates Richard Carlson, her new suitor. She has an Ingenue sister who lives with her in a mansion on a cliff top. Where else?
Walking on the beach below one night, she encounters Mr X, who tells her about herself for he is a medium and sensitive to her vibrations. [There were snickers from the fraternity bothers at his point.] The Viennese Mr X oils his way into her life.
He is an utter cynic, having planted an accomplice as a maid in the mansion to glean information. His aim is to separate this widow from a lot of moolah. Ingenue falls in love with him and his oily ways. Widow is perplexed by it all.
A séance is arranged in Oily’s wired up studio. The party is crashed by Carlson and the private dick he has employed. The crashers insist that the show go on; Oily tries to grease his way out of it to no avail. His hand is forced and the lights go down. Then….
The dead husband appears to all. No one is more amazed than the amazing Mr X in a star turn.
Seems husband has had several widows pining for him and he has plans to reduce the number. The plot twists even more, and Oily discovers, to his own surprise, that there are some things he will not do for money. Ingenue figures it all out and ….
It is a master class in creating an atmosphere heavy with mystery and peopling it with rounded characters yet including all the clichés, to wit, a crystal ball, a turban, and a raven. All in just over one hour of runtime.
The dead husband is menacing and ruthless. The private dick has a sense of humour. Carlson is so earnest that he made the fraternity brothers feel guilty. Ingenue is so enthusiastic it is hard to take. Babe is so perplexed that she must have been reading some of Martin Heidegger hieroglyphs.
But the real star of the show is the camera, and the lighting that emphasises the air of mystery and confusion. Harvard graduate Bernard Vorhaus directed. He is another victim whose career was blighted by the HUAC, the monster that roamed Hollywood off camera for far too long. He gave David Lean his first job in movies. After being black listed Vorhaus went to England with his Welsh wife and changed careers, working on home renovations. Our loss.

IMDb meta-data is Dali time of 1 hour and 10 minutes, rated a generous 3.0 by 837 cinemitizens.
Genre: Sy Fy, Horror, Boredom
Verdict: Incredible alright.

Here is the deal. John Carradine wants to touch the bottom of his career and so manufactures a diving bell and sends four nitwits to the bottom in it, two of each. That sounds a lot better than it is.
The first ten minutes is stock footage of the ocean. Thereafter the characters line up against a semi-circular wall and talk. Sometimes the wall is supposed to be in the mansion sized diving bell, sometimes in a Titanic ballroom on the tugboat transporting the bell, sometimes in Carradine’s California Marine Institute arena, and sometimes in the Golden Caves of Arizona.
Now, no one move!
Once aligned no one moves so that the focus does not have to be pulled again.
Is it Post-Modern? It does not privilege intelligence or interest over static and boring.
The four descend and get stranded, but that is all right because they find submarine caves rich in oxygen. Forty minutes of stumbling around and they encounter Santa Claus whose sleigh went down over water. He says he got there the same way they did. Evidently he acted in an earlier Jerry Warren movie. Poor guy.
They stand and talk, talk and stand, and, for a change of pace, stand and talk. Then thanks to a cut away, they are rescued by the second diving bell Carradine had up his sleeve.
Never have the words ‘The End’ been so welcome.
There is no tension. That two nubile women and two virile men are about to die in the caves, produces nothing but boredom in them and in us.
They read the script.
That the bearded Santa spies on them and has strange ways, leads to nothing. That they are rescued is done off-camera so there are no heroics there. Indeed the only mystery is why Robert Clarke keeps taking his shirt off and putting it back on again. The fraternity brothers counted three times, but they may have missed one when the beer keg popped.
Carradine is as always Carradine of the compelling mien and voice, but there is nothing for him to do and he does it — nothing. Lois Lane is there with even less to do. For the rest of the cast, this is their ‘Best Known For’ entry on the IMDb.
Written, produced, and directed by Jerry Warren who enjoys the reputation on IMDb as the auteur of cheap and ridiculous horror movie quickies. His CV includes ‘The World of Bat Woman,’ ‘Teenage Zombies,’ and ‘Terror of the Blood Hunters,’ each of which orbits a rating of 3, as does the waste of space at hand.
It was finished in 1957 but not even the Lippart Brothers would distribute it so it languished for two years before being paired with another turkey and released for the Drive In market confident no one would see it.
The fraternity brothers thought petrification happened to them while watching this drab and pointless use of celluloid.

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 5 minutes, rated 6.7 by 336 cinemitizens.
Genre: Noir, Horror, Comedy.

Verdict: Spooky and snappy.
It was a dark and stormy night as moody, muddy, and misty camera angles play over the dark mansion when a gun shot is heard from within. The front door of the mansion opens and three men emerge from it hefting a bundle into the trunk of a car and drive off. Through the wind and lightning the camera follows. They extract a deadman from the trunk and bury him on the vast grounds of the estate, while in the bushes they are silently observed by a solidarity and soggy onlooker. Whew! All of this before a word is spoken.
While this is going on, excited Daughter returns to the mansion to announce her wedding, finding her step-mother distracted, as her damp father and his two retainers return from their secret nocturnal errand. Bubbling though she is, Daughter realises something is amiss, the more so later when a spectral figure fires a gun at her while she lies abed. In the subsequent fuss, Father, Step-Mother, and retainers deny a shot was fired, while casting side-long glances at each other.
Despite being treated like an hysterical child, Daughter knows what she saw, and off-camera she places a secret phone call to the 4F Michael Shayne. Who else!
There is fine cinematography of the old dark house, the constant rain with thunder and lightning, and most of all the spooky and spectral figure who keeps reappearing in the night, he of the title.

There is much to’ing and fro’ing, mistaken identities, a bemused butler, a befuddled lawman, an intrigued undertaker, a pompous father, a scheming step-mother, a strange laboratory in the basement, plotting retainers, all in all it is a veritable school of red herrings in which Shayne fishes.
This is an entry in the Michael Shayne series started in 1940, starring Lloyd Nolan as the eponym.

He made a career out of playing the New York City Irishman, following in Pat O’Brien’s footsteps, though he was born and reared in San Francisco, attending Stanford University until catching the acting bug. He spent virtually no time in NYC, least of all Flatbush and Brooklyn, except for location filming. While his Irishisms are gratuitous in this film, he delivers them with an effortless panache. He is described as ‘an actor’s actor,’ whatever that means.
The excellent screen play was by Arnaud d’Usseau, California born, but who took this name for caché, says inter-web gossip. He was later black-listed thanks to the efforts of Elia Kazan, which brought d’Usseau’s career to a premature end.
Released on 1 May 1942, within a week Corregidor surrendered and 12,000 GIs became POWs to join a like number captured on Bataan. You would never know the war was on watching this film, which perhaps was the aspiration of the filmmakers, because none of the news at the time was good and it got worse. As the film travelled the country the news reels preceding would have covered Corregidor. The Bataan Death March was censored until 1944.

IMDb runtime an eternity of 1 hour and 2 minutes, over-rated a generous 6.0 by 1147.
Genre: Sy Fy
The earth does not scream.
Verdict: A quota quickie in every way but fact.
The set-up is a nice opening with a British Rail train, late as usual, ploughing off a bridge because the engineer is dead at the controls. (Union rules mean a dead driver cannot be fired.) Then an airplane does the same with a dead pilot at the controls. (Same union rule.) A bowler-hatted gentleman at a train station, who failed to notice the dead bodies littering the platform, keels over. There follows pan shots of village streets with folks who fell dead in their tracks, the newspaper delivery boy, a lady shopper at a green grocer, a bus driver, and so on.

This is nice and there is no sound to distract. The silence makes it more ominous.
Into such a village of the dead drives Worster in a Land Rover, as he exits the vehicle he takes out an Enfield rifle. Whoa. He helps himself to food at a shop and then a drink in a pub, stepping over and around the littered bodies. As he sips in the pub he is accosted by Dennis Price, whom I could not take seriously as a villain, but villain he is. For a start he is in the company of a lady who is not his wife, but whom he introduces as his wife, and we know she is someone else’s wife! Go figure. On this subject there is more tittle-tattle to follow. Read on.
Later they are joined by a young couple. Thus we have gathered in the village of Otranto the crew. Worster is an American among the Brits. Ok. He claims to be a test pilot with the Vertical Take Off and Landing project, the Harrier Jump Jet as it was later called. That was a nice topical reference, but, hey, Worster is forty-nine (49, for those who cannot read words) and long in the tooth and grey in the hair, and large of the waistline for a flyboy and it shows in his leaden movements. Then we have Dennis without menace. His companion is Old Virginie, and she is forty-five. They are joined by a couple in their late twenties. Thorley Walters and his companion are also there to add the buffoon touch to the gathering.
They make an uneasy alliance and try to infer what has happened. The conclusion is that there was a gas attack and those, like themselves who survived, were sealed up somewhere, the pilot in an airplane, the villain and his moll is sealed room, and so…(I forget what the others said). (This quarantine also figures in the superior ‘The Night of the Comet’ (1984) reviewed elsewhere on this blog.) The gas has now dissipated.
Ah ha! The pilot was in a plane, but one of those was shown in the lead-in…and he was dead at the controls. How come Worster did not cack it, too, chimed the fraternity brothers. Dunno.
The young woman is pregnant and Old Virginie is assigned to look after her because she is a woman and women know about such things. To her credit she denies such knowledge, but the chaps disregard this is the best style of the times. While they are drinking themselves into oblivion in the pub they see strange figures in the streets. The requisite hysterical woman in their number rushes out, and has to run after and after, in her six inch high heels, the Reynolds Wrapped creatures, who are oblivious to her until she grabs one. It is a nice moment when it turns and reveals itself to be … a Republican Congressman and zaps her.

Another Brexit voter exits.

Zap! The others observe this zapology from a distance.
Later in a twist some of the dead rise as white-eyed zombies and there is one nice moment of tension when Old Virginie hides in a wardrobe from one such zombie. Being dead, they have an excuse for their leaden motions. Along the way Thorley also gets zapped, or did he. Can’t remember. Dennis without menace is offed. That leaves the young and old couples, plus the newborn baby.
Later these Reynolds Wrappers move like lead, even slower than Worster, and seem to be deaf, dumb, and blind as well as Republican. If their mission is to finish off the survivors of the gas attack in a search and destroy mission they have failed the KPIs miserably. It turns out they are robots controlled by radio transmission from a conveniently located tower which Worster blows up (because as a test pilot he is also a demolition expert) and that frees the local area of this scourge. Whew!
What next? They will find a plane and fly around to attract the attention of other survivors. Huh? Won’t that attract the attention of other Reynolds Wrappers, too? And the plane we see take off is a four engined Constellation that needs a long hard runway. It will not bob down to pick a few folk standing around an SOS sign.
The end.
Worster and Old Virginie (she being Brit) were married in 1951, more than a decade before they teamed up in this outing and they stayed married until her death in 1992.
It was not a quota quickie, as explained elsewhere on this blog, but it has some of the qualities in the cheap production and gratuitous insertion of an American actor from the C-list, and it was distributed by Lippart, a well-known bottom feeder. The chatter on the inter-web is that Old Virginie went back to England for family reasons and Worster came along and they did this film to pay for the trip.
It fits the Brit practice of Sy Fy in rural settings. Long before Midsomer Murders the English countryside was a strange place where strange thing happened to the strange people who are there. It was also cheaper to film that.