I think I’ve written about this before – movies that I used to see on TV all the time, but which disappeared into oblivion.
In this case I’m thinking about the horrible, cheap horror and monster films from the 1950s that used to be the staple of “horror host” shows. And, in particular, WPIX’s Chiller Theater on channel 11 in Ne York in the 1960s and early 1970s. The REAL early ones, when the show opened with a montage of scenes from these very films, not the later one with the stop-motion animated six-fingered hand. This one:
A few of thos movies are well-known and you can see them on streaming services or DVD, like Plan Nine from Outer Space or Killer from Space. But most of these flicks seem gone forever. I never saw them broadcast on cable TV, or on VHS, or on DVDs, or on current streaming. And yet I thought all those venues were inexhaustible maws simply aching for cheap content to fill the time and sales figures.
Movies like:
The Cape Canaveral Monsters – aliens take over corpse bodies, plan nine-like, in order to mess with our space program. They’re stopped by hot-rodding teenagers who build hydrogen bomb using plastic belts (really!)
Voodoo Island – Boris Karloff slumming it in a movie about an island with zombies and man- (or at least child-) eating plants
Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman – People still remember thos one because it had one of the greatest movie posters of all time:
The movie couldn’t hope to live up to this – the special effects are woefully sub-par even for a 1950s cheapie like this. The backgrounds keep bleeding through the images of the giant man and woman. The spaceship is basically a dot of light. The giant rubber prop hand is obviously a giant rubber prop hand. The remakes and parodies (The Daryl Hannah 1993 TV-movie, attach of the 50 fot cheerleader, Attack of the 50 foot Centerfold. Heck, even the contemporary parody The forty foot Bride of Candy Rock – Lou Costello’s last film) had better effects. Directed by Nathan Juran, who had directed The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jack the Giant Killer.
The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake
The Neanderthal Man and Monster on the Campus , which feel like the same film.
Giant from the Unknown
The Cyclops – Bert I Gordon movie in Cinemascope, but still with rotten effects. The makeup, though, was pretty impressive, and super-creepy to me as a kid. It’s in the opening montage linked to above. The film had Lon Chaney, Jr., but the highlight is Duncan Parkin’s Cyclops. He only made two movies, and they were both Bert I. Gordon movies in which he played a one-eyed, mentally challenged bald monster who dies at the end (the other was War of the Colossal Beast). He was definitely typecast.
The Ape Man - Bela Lugosi in a cheap movie about a scientist who plays with hormone extracts from apes. Curiously, it’s got the same premise as The Ape, which starred Boris Karloff as the scientist (but which was never on Chiller Theater). It’s rooted in what was actual research at the time – using extracts from apes to try to cure polio.
Plan Nine from Outer Space – arguably the Gold Standard of bad 1950s fantastic cinema. It’s bad, but at least it’s entertainingly bad.
The Black Sleep – People who say Bela Lugosi couldn’t find work in the 1950s overlook films like this, which also had Tor Johnson (from Plan Nine) and a definitely slumming John Carradine.
The Manster – a Japanese-American co-production about a Japanese mad scientist and his experiments on people. He injects an American businessman with a serum that causes him to grow an eye on his should, that eventually becomes a second head. This film probably influenced the 1989 film How to get Ahead in Advertising (really!)
Killers from Space – Peter Graves long before Mission: Impossible as a test pilot who observes an atomic bomb test and gets kidnapped by aliens. MST3K shoulda done this one. They didn’t, but The Film Crew did.