I’ve posted this before, but anyway. . .
In one episode of the old “Gomer Pyle” tv program, there’s a scene where he’s standing outside a movie box office, and they have a sign promoting the current showing “KEN CONQUERS THE WORLD,”
Even before I knew of Frankenstein Conquers the World, I assumed War of the Gargantuas was a sequel. The latter is a much better movie, IMO, the second best kaiju film Toho released in the 1960s only beat by Invasion of Astro-Monster (Always Monster Zero in my heart) which was WotG’s bill mate at the drive-in.
Cool factoid about War of the Gargantuas: Tarantino modeled the fight scene between Uma Thurman and Darryl Hannah in Kill Bill after the Gargantuas.
There was a movie that was on one of those late night movie shows the networks used to have called Embryo. I remember very little about other than it was about a scientist growing a woman in a lab but it had an embryonic dog in a jar that freaked me the hell out as a little kid.
Houlihan and Big Chuck were the presenters of these movies every Friday night in the ‘70s, interspersed with some locally made comedy skits.
Those days aren’t coming back. It’s just as well.
I never saw it, but I saw the case for the video. It starred Rock Hudson and Barbara Carrera (who was the Bad Girl in the James Bond movie Never say Never Again).
If you want a more upbeat movie about a scientist cloning a woman, try Creator, starring Peter O’Toole as a Nobel Laureate cloning his dead wife. It’s a surprisingly witty film that never veers into horror.
I watched The Crawling Eye twice. The first time, I was about six. After the first few scenes, us kids had to go to bed. Our house was small and the interior doors were kept open. Hearing the show, while in the dark, was very scary.
Watching it as an adult - - not scary at all.
War Of The Gargantuas has long been a favorite of mine, from the ill-fated shipmate shouting “Hey, you guys!” in the beginning to the ill-fated singer’s clothing being spit out on the street to the Gargantua battle cry…that to me has always sounded like “Shit!!!”.
You haven’t earned your cred as a kooky hip band until you have covered “The Words Get Stuck in my Throat”.
I had an Air Blaster when I was a kid. It lasted long enough for me to give it to my friend’s son. The rubber gasket or whatever you call it finally gave way.
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die
and
The Man Without A Body
It’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen this but I rather liked it. It was an improvement over the Jules Verne novel which relied too heavily on someone driving at 150-200mph as being “too fast to see” (to be fair, the novel was written in 1904).
Also: every film is better with Vincent Price in it.
One of the Martians looks like he just walked off the set of a cheap porn flick:
To be even fairer, the movie was based on Verne’s Robur the Conqueror and its sequel, Master of the World, but it’s really almost completely based on Robur the Conqueror, which is sort of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, only with a flying machine instead of a submarine. I suspect the filmmakers thought that “Robur the Conqueror” sounded like a movie about somebody like Genghis Khan. And, besides “Master of the World” sounds way cooler. There are no land-speeding cars in Robur the Conqueror. That’s the Terror from Master of the World, which is also an ocean-going vessel.
Th movie’s not really an improvement over Robur the Conqueror, although the problem with that book is that it’s so much like 20,000 Leagues that you feel a sense of deja vu – brilliant inventor comes up with a revolutionary vehicle (in this case, a heavier-than-air flying machine that’s a sort of super-helicopter) and takes as prisoners a group of people including an expert who can appreciate what he’s done and takes them on a tour of the world in his machine, but won’t ever let them leave.
One of the great things about the book is that Verne was far ahead of his time in choosing the material his aeronef, the Albatross, was made of. It’s not made out of aluminum, as you might expect (and as the vehicle used in From the Earth to the Moon was fabricated of). It was made of composites! Yes, he really did use that modern-sounding material, although not the modern technology. At the time they were making railroad wheels out of fibrous material bound with filler and set under high pressure. It was surprisingly tough and gave a smoother ride than iron wheels. Verne chose it because it was both extremely strong and extremely light. Real-world aircraft designers didn’t start incorporating composites into planes until the 1950s, and they didn’t exploit it for its most desirable properties as an essential lightweight component until the late 1970s, with such human-powered aircraft as the Gossamer Albatross and the Daedalus.
Another one that traumatized me as a kid was called A Mouse and his Child. It was a cartoon that ran often on HBO about a toy mouse and his son(?) who were alive (all the toys were alive Toy Story style) and linked at the arms.
There is a scene where the rats who are the villains of the story pull apart a poor toy Donkey. I can still see him pathetically try to crawl away when they jump on him and pull him apart with wrenches in silhouette.
I had a lot of stuffed animals as a kid and they all had names and personalities so this really hit me at that time but it’s a movie I don’t think anyone else remembers or ever heard of.
As a kid, I remember The Enornous Egg, about an egg that hatches into a triceratops, being shown every once in a while.
Also, the Eiler-Bargy videotaped plays based on fairy tales, many featuring an actor who went by Will B. Able. “Aladdin (1967),” “Jack and the Beanstalk (1965),” “Pinocchio (1965),” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes (1967)” for example. These came on rather frequently back in the old days. (In the pic of WBA as “The Giant,” he was not a particularly tall man, so they gave him a huge prosthetic head to make him look tall.
For me it was Seymor and the slime wall.
Larry Vincent - Wikipedia
We saw a RiffTrax production of this once. Great fun!
I’m going to say the original “War of the Worlds” movie released in 1953. I know our older members will disagree, but I’ve never met a person younger than 50 years old who even knew what I meant with the word, “original”. That may be because it is a very difficult movie to find on premium movie channels or streaming services. I have access to HBO, Starz, Showtime, Cinemax, Paramount, Prime, Netflix, etc, and it has literally been years since I’ve seen it televised on any of them. So, it’s not a movie you are likely to run into accidentally while your surfing movie channels.
I liked it but it probably would have benefited by being condensed into one night rather than two. Wikipedia says the runtime was cut approximately in half for the home video version.
The Martians’ robot reminds me of a shrinking machine I cobbled together from refrigerator packing boxes for a homecoming review when I was in high school.