War of the Colossal Beast

Director: Bert I Gordon
Writer: George Worthing Yates
Producer: Bert I Gordon
Cast: Sally Fraser, Duncan Parkin, Roger Pace
Year of release: 1958
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Direct Video Distribution)

War of the Colossal Beast is terrific! It’s a genuine AIP classic and is pretty much unique among 1950s B-movies in being a direct sequel to another film, The Amazing Colossal Man. Think about it: apart from this, the Creature from the Black Lagoon trilogy and the Fly trilogy, what other 1950s SF/horror sequels are there? (You can’t really count How to Make a Monster.)

Russ Bender is the only cast member to return from the first film although he’s now playing a character named Dr Carmichael whereas before he was Richard Kingman (which was the name of Ed Kemmer’s character in Earth vs the Spider). Coincidentally Bender also played a ‘Dr Carmichael’ in War of the Worlds. He was also a doctor in Invasion of the Saucer Men and was in It Conquered the World, Panic in Year Zero and The Navy Vs the Night Monsters.

The colossal fellow himself, Colonel Glenn Manning, is now played by Duncan Parkin, who had been a grip on Bert I Gordon’s Beginning of the End. This film and a similar giant the previous year in The Cyclops were his only screen credits. Hideous skull-like make-up by Jack H Young (The Cyclops, The Brood, Salem’s Lot) covering half his face effectively covers the fact that the character is played by a different actor (Glen Langan) in flashbacks to the first film, which take up five minutes of the movie’s brief 68-minute running time.

At the end of Amazing..., sixty-foot tall Colonel Manning was blasted with bazookas and fell off a dam, presumed dead. In this film he is found alive in Mexico, but scarred mentally as well as physically. Parkin is never called on to do more than grunt or roar - this is a colossal beast, no longer a man (although calling the movie's story a 'war' is stretching things a bit...).

Sally Fraser (It Conquered the World, Earth vs the Spider) plays Manning’s sister Joyce who makes the incredible deductive leap that her brother has survived when she hears a jokey news report about a missing truck South of the Border. (The TV newsreader is Jack Kosslyn: Empire of the Ants, Attack of the Puppet People, Earth vs the Spider.)

John Swanson (George Becwar: Bride of the Monster) is the owner of the truck which apparently vanished into thin air, the young Mexican lad who was driving it having gone mad. Joyce investigates along with Major Mark Baird (a solitary screen credit for Roger Pace) who has a weird symbol on his uniform - an A inside a six-pointed star. What is that, the Jewish Air Force?

Well, it turns out that old Glenn has been stealing trucks for the food they carry, which makes no sense because at his size he would need to get through about 30 or 40 truckloads a day, but never mind the logistics. They find a giant footprint near where Swanson’s truck disappeared and there’s a terrific scene when Joyce and Baird climb to the top of an inaccessible local mesa - and find a dozen or so wrecked vehicles. That’s quite a clever, subtle bit of plot development for a Bert I Gordon movie!

The thing that was Glenn appears shortly afterwards. For the most part the matting and back-projection work very well; it was of course Gordon’s forte so he should know how to do it, and the flashback clips from the first film suggest a definite improvement in the technique.

Glenn is captured - using a truck full of doped bread! - and flown to the USA. There is a wonderful sequence where three different government departments shuttle the problem between themselves, all arguing that there is nothing in their legislative remit about handling sixty-foot tall men. And at this point I realised - this is a comedy! Pay close attention to the dialogue and there are some absolute gems as writer George Worthing Yates has real fun with the movie’s obviously daft central premise.

Anyway, Glenn is shackled up in an aircraft hanger at Los Angeles airport, breaks free, is restrained, breaks free again and goes on the rampage. Joyce still cares about her brother, however big and hideous he is, and somehow manages to touch the remnant of humanity within him so that he realises what a monster he has become. He strides over to some power cables - this one scene is actually a miniature set, rather than a matte - and commits suicide by electrocution. (Or does he? He just seems to disappear, rather than actually falling down or exploding or melting or anything...)

Famously, in those final few seconds the film bursts into Technicolor. Although the (full-frame) print used by DVD Ltd is as nice and crisp as anything in their Arkoff Film Library, the Technicolor footage is very ropy indeed, in even worse shape than the final colour reel of How to Make a Monster.

Nevertheless, if you’re looking to dip your toes into the world of AIP, this is a good one to go for. As with all the DVD Ltd Sam Arkoff films, there is a 50-minute audio interview with the man himself, plus nice poster-reproduction postcards and tatty trailers for nine films: Voodoo Woman, Blood of Dracula, Day the World Ended, The Brain Eaters, How to Make a Monster, The She-Creature, The Undead, Earth Vs The Spider and this one. The film was originally released in the UK as The Terror Strikes.

MJS rating: A-

How to Make a Monster

Director: Herbert L Strock
Writers: Herman Cohen, Kenneth Langtry
Producer: Herman Cohen
Cast: Robert H Harris, Gary Conway, Gary Clarke
Year of release: 1958
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK (Region 0) DVD (Direct Video Distribution)

This is one of my favourite 1950s B-movies for several reasons. It’s a bizarre semi-sequel to two bona fide classics - I was a Teenage Werewolf and I was a Teenage Frankenstein - and it features props from several other AIP productions. But mostly it’s just a stark raving wacky storyline played deliciously straight.

Teenage Werewolf was probably the single most influential horror movie of the 1950s - even more so than the almost contemporaneous Curse of Frankenstein. It opened up the previously untapped teenage market, coinciding with a boom in car ownership among young people that made drive-ins a major distribution sector, and with the release of the old Universal monster movies to TV for the first time. The launch of Famous Monsters of Filmland didn’t hurt things either!

Werewolf was followed by Teenage Frankenstein, then Blood of Dracula - which was I was a Teenage Vampire in all but name. Herman Cohen couldn’t get enough of the title: even Konga was originally pitched as I was a Teenage Gorilla!

How to... isn’t a direct sequel to Werewolf or Frankenstein, it’s a movie about the making of a sequel to Werewolf and Frankenstein! It’s set on the lot of American International Pictures (producer/writer Cohen makes a cameo appearance in a screening room scene and there are AIP posters on various walls) where Teenage Werewolf Meets Teenage Frankenstein is in production. The make-up is by Philip Scheer who had worked on both the original films as well as Attack of the Puppet People and Invisible Invaders. But the actors underneath it are different: the Teenage Frankenstein is played by ‘Tony Mantell’ who is played by Gary Conway (Land of the Giants) while the Teenage Werewolf is played by ‘Larry Drake’ who is played by Gary Clarke (Missile to the Moon) making his feature debut. I hope you’re following this because there will be a test later.

Robert H Harris (The Invisible Boy) stars as make-up artist Pete Dumond. Short, balding and starey-eyed, he’s a sort of TK Maxx Donald Pleasance and consequently makes a great villain by looking oddball but harmless. Paul Brinegar (Wishbone in Rawhide, later seen in the godawful 1980s SF comedy Spaceship) is his oddball assistant Riviero.

Dumond may be loosely based on Jack Pierce, a master craftsman of make-up unappreciated by the new owners of the studio. They have decreed that monster movies are a passing fad and that once TWMTF wraps they will concentrate on rock’n’roll movies, so Dumond and Riviero can pack their bags. But Dumond has discovered a formula which, when added to make-up, makes the wearer totally subservient to suggestion. He mixes this in with the make-up for the two teen stars and sends them out to kill the movie execs. He also - and this makes no sense at all - slaps the make-up hurriedly on himself at one point to commit murder.

Just over an hour into the 73-minute feature the lovely, crisp print quality - showcasing the excellent work of cinematographer Maury Gertzman (She-Wolf of London, The Brute Man, The Creature Walks Among Us) - shifts down a noticeable grade. This is because the final reel is shot on Technicolor stock and bursts into glorious colour a minute or so in. Dumond has creepily lured the two teenagers back to his home where the wall are adorned with his ‘children’ - horror masks. Most of them are generic, possibly early home-produced efforts by Paul Blaisdell. But prominent among them are an alien from Invasion of the Saucer-Men, Beulah from It Conquered the World and the She-Creature. Fantastic!

The great Morris Ankrum (Earth Vs the Flying Saucers, The Giant Claw etc) and Walter Reed (Missile Monsters) are policemen, while John Ashley (who made another Frankenfilm in 1958 - the completely loopy Frankenstein’s Daughter - and later became a staple of Philippines-shot exploitation fare) plays himself in a rehearsal for a rock’n’roll flick. The lovely gals dancing around him are choreographed by Lee Scott who had the same unlikely credit on Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla!

Co-writer Langtry is actually Aben Kandel whose horror CV goes back to uncredited work on 1935’s Werewolf of London. He wrote this and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein as Langtry, and I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Blood of Dracula as Ralph Thornton. Credits under his own name include Berserk, Craze, Konga and Trog. Cinematographer Maury Gertsman also photograaphed the final two Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes pictures, Terror by Night and Dressed to Kill.

Extras include a 50-minute audio interview with Samuel Z Arkoff recorded at the NFT, plus nice poster-reproduction postcards and tatty trailers for nine AIP films: Voodoo Woman, Blood of Dracula, Day the World Ended, The Brain Eaters, War of the Clossal Beast, The She-Creature, The Undead, Earth Vs The Spider and this one. This is a great presentation of a glorious film. DVD Ltd slipped up slightly by calling the main character ‘Paul Drummond’ on the sleeve, but I won’t penalise them a grade for that.

MJS rating: A-
review originally posted 8th May 2005

Earth vs The Spider

Director: Bert I Gordon
Writers: Bert I Gordon, Laszlo Gorog, George Worthing Yates
Producers: Bert I Gordon, Samuel Z Arkoff, James H Nicholson
Cast: Gene Persson, June Kenney, Ed Kemmer
Year of release: 1958
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK (Region 0) DVD (Direct Video Distribution)

You can’t really go wrong with a giant spider movie. From Tarantula to Eight-Legged Freaks via Spiders and, um, Spiders 2, big things with eight jointed legs are a horror staple.

In this AIP production, high school students Mike (Gene Persson, later a Broadway producer!) and Carol (June Kenney: The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, Attack of the Puppet People) go looking for her father when he doesn’t return home from a business trip; they find his crashed car on a deserted highway near a length of strange, sticky ‘rope’ and wonder if he sought shelter in a nearby cave. Inside they find various skeletons, Carol’s dead father - and a giant spider, about fifty feet across. (Persson and Kenney were paired again three years later in Bloodlust.)

The sceptical sheriff (Gene Roth: a staple of serials whose credits go back to the 1923 Hunchback of Notre Dame and who played another sheriff-threatened-by-oversize-invertebrates the following year in Attack of the Giant Leeches) nevertheless rounds up a posse who investigate the cave, confront the spider and kill it with vast amounts of DDT. Mike and Carol’s science teacher Mr Kingman (Ed Kemmer: Giant from the Unknown) realises that such a unique specimen deserves study and the arachnid's carcass is transported (somehow!) back to town and stored in - where else? - the school hall.

The prom is imminent so a truly lame seven-piece rock and roll band (featuring comedy ‘fat bass player’ Skip Young from The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet) get past school janitor Hugo (Hank Patterson, also in Tarantula) and start rehearsing on stage, and the passing drama club just have to cut a rug to the happening sounds, man. At which point the spider wakes up and goes on the rampage!

The longer title of this film, Earth vs the Spider, is used on the print and on the disc itself although the sleeve just calls it The Spider. Of course Earth doesn’t come into it as all the action is restricted to the little town of River Falls, where the local cinema (managed by Mike’s dad) is showing two other AIP movies: War of the Colossal Beast and Attack of the Puppet People (which also has Hank Patterson as a janitor) - a little bit of canny cross-promotion there. Among those specifically targeted by the monster, in the way of these things, is Kingman’s wife (Sally Fraser: War of the Colossal Beast, It Conquered the World).

The spider returns to its cave and the entrance is dynamited to keep it in there. Mickey Finn is astoundingly wooden as construction foreman Haskel who oversees the operation and one can see why most of his characters (in movies like Robin and the Seven Hoods and Taras Bulba) had no names. But wait, it’s not that simple. Mike and Carol were in the cave looking for a dropped brooch, so now the Sheriff, their parents, Kingman and the rest of them have to dig down into the cave to (a) rescue the kids and (b) kill the spider once and for all using mains electricity.

Giant things (or giant people) was a speciality of Bert I Gordon, whose apposite initials have oft been commented upon. In Beginning of the End he famously created the effect of giant locusts scrambling up a skyscraper by having normal-size locusts walk on a photograph, and the same technique is evident here, though not obviously so. A tarantula portrays the titular menace - though it does seem to change species a few times. However, this is combined with some decent matte work to surprisingly reasonable effect (sometimes the spider is matted in, sometimes the people). On the other hand, the use of photographic mattes to give foreground detail to the cave scenes results in geological features of a two-dimensionality unseen since the days of Georges Melies. When required to interact directly, there is a large prop spider leg which is waved from off-screen.

Cinematographer Jack Marta shot scores of westerns as well as SOS Tidal Wave and the 1960s Batman TV series while screenwriter Laszlo Gorog (The Mole People, The Land Unknown) was - here’s trivia for you! - the grandfather of the actor who provides the voice of Commander Nebula in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command! And watch out for a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland in one scene.

The Spider is one of the first releases from DVD Ltd’s ‘Arkoff Film Library’ and is a nice, crisp print though full-screen. Like all the other titles in the initial batch, it includes a 50-minute audio recording of Arkoff interviewed at the NFT plus trailers for nine AIP flicks: War of the Clossal Beast, Voodoo Woman, Blood of Dracula, Day the World Ended, The Brain Eaters, How to Make a Monster, The She-Creature, The Undead and this film. The trailer uses the on-screen title The Spider and is in much worse shape than the film, not only very scratchy but so dark that little can be seen in places. Also included is a set of nine postcards reproducing the posters of all nine films, which form the basis for the sleeve artwork of the respective titles. (The NFT interview is a good, clear recording and plays over a repeated gallery of five photos of Arkoff on stage.)

For fans of 1950s B-movies, this is a smashing release of an archetypal movie in a very attractive version - and at a bargaintastic price of only a tenner. The Spider is a not a great film by any stretch of the imagination but it’s a great example of its type of film. DVD Ltd have the rights to 35 Arkoff titles and if they all look this good it’s going to cost me 350 quid!

But what really endeared me to this film is the revelation, about fifty minutes in, that Mike’s surname is Simpson - I have a movie namesake!

MJS rating: B+
review originally posted before November 2004