Category: Science fiction

Really Awful Movies: Ep 171 – The Giant Gila Monster

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The Giant Gila Monster is not only a 1959 monster movie, there’s a sci fi component too. And hell, it’s a hot rod juvenile delinquent flick too.

The Giant Gila Monster was directed by Ray Kellogg and produced by Ken Curtis.

It’s a decidedly low-budget affair, meant to be an accompaniment to the equally less-than-spectacular The Killer Shrews (another Ken Curtis production), a film perhaps best known for being sent up on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

The film stars failed matinee idol Don Sullivan, a veteran of several low budget monster and zombie films, and Lisa Simone, the French contestant for Miss Universe of 1957 (who had zero acting chops), as well as “comic relief” of Shug Fisher and KLIF disc jockey Ken Knox.

The effects included a live Mexican beaded lizard (not an actual Gila monster) filmed on a scaled-down model landscape.

A drive-in cash-in, the film is a pretty good example of the kind of creature feature the 1950s were famous for.

In our discussion of the film on the Really Awful Movies Podcast, we delve into 50s sensibilities, the singing abilities of Don Sullivan (and the infamous Mushroom Song), our total inability to speak Spanish (which we butcher like a hog), language use, and of course, spinning platters.

Really Awful Movies: Ep 168 – Plan 9 from Outer Space

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Its reputation precedes it. But does Plan 9 from Outer Space (original title Grave Robbers from Outer Space) deserve all the derogation? Some say it is the worst film ever made. This is patently false. We’d go to our graves (speaking of robbing them), saying Dana Carvey’s The Master of Disguise is worse.

Plan 9 is a 1959 independently made American black-and-white science fiction-horror film that was only released theatrically in 1959 by Distributors Corporation of America (as Valiant Pictures). The film is the product of an auteur. It was written, produced, directed, and edited by Ed Wood and stars Gregory Walcott, Mona McKinnon, legendary Scandinavian wrestler Tor Johnson, and hostess with the mostess, Vampira.

And most people know that Hollywood icon Bela Lugosi died mid-production, only to be replaced by a larger gentleman covering his visage with a cape.

The plot concerns extraterrestrials who are seeking to stop humanity from creating a doomsday weapon that could destroy the universe. The aliens implement “Plan 9”, a scheme to resurrect the Earth’s dead, referred to in the movie as “ghouls”. By causing bedlam, the aliens hope the crisis will force humanity to listen to them. If not, the aliens will then destroy mankind with armies of zombies. Or something. It’s a tad confusing.

And there are continuity errors aplenty. Viewers will have a blast noting day for night issues, the number of times the narrator says “my friends,” and of course, the infamous string allowing the flying saucers to…not so much fly, as hover in the frame.

 

 

Really Awful Movies: Ep 135 – Ultra Warrior

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Ultra Warrior is a pastiche…Ah, forget the fancy verbiage…who are we kidding? It’s cobbled together stock footage crap!

The film takes leftover Corman footage, combining outer space, horror films and dystopian into one bizarro experience.

Starring Dack Rambo (that is his real surname), the film focuses on the land of Oblivion, the entire area of the eastern seaboard, east of Kansas City (?). Oblivion has mining materials that need to be exploited so the humans who managed to survive a nuclear apocalypse can use the fruits of their labors as ingredients for anti-alien weaponry. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, but that’s what you get when footage from at least 10 other films is used. Oh, and one group of people exploit another, genetic mutations known as “muties.”

Good fun.