LET’S GET PHYSICAL: TEST TUBE BABIES (1948) ** ½

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on August 20th, 2007)

Ed Wood regular Timothy Farrell made his film debut in this “Adults Only” movie from George Weiss, the producer of Glen or Glenda. He plays a doctor trying to help a young couple named George (William Thomason) and Cathy (Dorothy Duke) weigh their options once they realize that George is shooting blanks. He preaches about artificial insemination (a wowser of a concept at the time) and convinces them to have the procedure done.

This “educational” flick runs a scant 52 minutes with most of the running time spent on a wild party they attend. (They only go to the doctor during the last 15 minutes or so.) There are brief scenes of both the insemination and the birth, but nothing is ever shown. A surprising topless catfight and some tantalizingly brief glimpses of nudity assured the ‘40s audience would get their share of cheap thrills as well as sex education.

While the film is frankly informative, you have to sit through a lot of domestic stuff before you get to the actual procedure. But hey, at this running time you can’t complain that much. Farrell is pretty good especially when giving his chuckle inducing speeches and reprised his role in Hometown Girl released the same year.

AKA: Blessed Are They. AKA: Sins of Love. AKA: The Pill.

MONSTER HUNTER (2020) **

After bidding farewell to the Resident Evil franchise, director Paul W.S. Anderson and his wife/muse Milla Jovovich hopped aboard another video game movie.  Now, Monster Hunter is a video game I had never heard of, let alone played, so I can’t say how faithful it is to the source material.  All I know is it’s a big comedown from the Resident Evil flicks. 

Milla plays an Army Ranger whose team enters a mysterious sandstorm and wind up in another dimension where they do battle with monsters who burrow through the desert like Bugs Bunny on his way to Pismo Beach. Eventually she comes in contact with Tony Jaa, another lost/temporally displaced traveler in the desert.  After gaining each other’s trust, they band together to fight the monsters in hopes of finding a way back home. 

I love it when a movie shows me something I’ve never seen before.  Monster Hunter gives us the delirious sight of a bleach blonde Ron Perlman piloting a pirate ship across dry land.  Not a bad way to start a movie if you ask me.  We also get a cat man pirate who is criminally underutilized. 

Unfortunately, things become frustratingly generic after the fun opening as the desert battle scenes are kind of a bust, and the escape from the creatures’ hive sequence feels like leftovers from an Alien sequel.  It also doesn’t help that the monsters themselves don’t have much personality as they resemble giant ticks and/or the offspring of a dragon and the sandworm from Tremors. 

Also, the fights between Jaa and Jovovich, two of my favorite action stars working today, are strangely lackluster.  They’re overedited, underchoreographed, and underwhelming.  The climax is likewise tepid as the whole thing boils down to them fighting a dragon.  The gratuitous set-up for a sequel doesn’t help matters either.  I will say it’s never boring, and the sight of Jovovich and Jaa together is fun, even if Anderson doesn’t quite make the most of their talents. 

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: SEX MADNESS (1938) ***

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on August 18th, 2007)

This ranks up there next to Reefer Madness as a classic example of a ‘30s scare film. This time it’s not marijuana that is the destroyer of innocent youth, but syphilis. See innocent naïve chorus girls get wrapped up in “wild” parties where they have sex and catch the deadly disease. See young starlets sleep with producers to get ahead and get more VD than PR out of it. See innocent husbands contract the disease from their infected fiancées. See infected women give birth to syphilis ridden children. See a trip to a “real” syphilis ward. See hints of lesbianism. See doctors lecturing about the evils of sex. I don’t know if anyone took this seriously in 1938, but almost 70 years later it works pretty well as camp. It’s not as funny as Reefer Madness is but the subject matter and how it’s handled should elicit more chuckles from you than those filmstrips they showed you in Family Life class. Director Dwain Esper also directed the equally sensational Maniac. For a pretty funny send-up of this movie, you should check out Amazon Women on the Moon.

AKA: Human Wreckage. AKA: They Must Be Told.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: REEFER MADNESS (1936) ***

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on August 18th, 2007)

The most famous and funniest of the drug scare movies of the ‘30s is just as hilarious today as when it was first released. During an emergency PTA meeting, a leading drug expert tells concerned parents about how people smuggle drugs into their community then settles in and tells them a story how marijuana damaged the lives of some happening young people. A drug dealing married couple invites several of the neighborhood teens to their swinging pad to dance and play records and get them all hooked on Mary Jane. Some of the kids end up as murderers, commit suicide, and become clinically insane.

I’ve never done any kinds of drugs, but I’ve seen stoners in real life, and they don’t swing dance, play piano like Chico Marx on speed, or commit murders. Dave (The Devil Bat) O’Brien takes the acting honors as Ralph who becomes hooked on the cursed devil weed. The scenes of chain smoking, wild eyed, pot puffing teens aren’t easily forgotten. It was re-released several times under many different names and was one of the first midnight cult movies to gain notoriety. Star Dorothy Short (who was also married to O’Brien) was also in the marijuana themed Assassin of Youth the next year.

AKA: Tell Your Children. AKA: Doped Youth.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: MANIAC (1934) ****

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on December 12th, 2008)

Dwain Esper, the man who brought us the immortal Reefer Madness, directed this hilarious cult classic that plays like a Frankenstein movie cross pollinated with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat”.

A psychotic physician blackmails an out of work actor (“Once a ham, always a ham!”) into assisting him in his experiments in which he tries to bring the dead back to life.  After the assistant murders the doctor, he hides his corpse behind the basement wall and uses his acting talents to impersonate the doctor.  The dude gets so crazy that he plucks the eyeball out of a cat and eats it.  (“It’s not unlike an oyster or a grape!”)  He also experiments on a drug that turns a patient into a wild screeching maniac who rips the clothes off of a woman and rapes her.  Eventually the cops come and discover the doctor’s body and lock the assistant’s nutty ass up.

To get away with the lurid subject matter, Esper tacked on a written prologue warning the audience of the dangers of mental illness, as well as title cards in between scenes giving us a lot of medical terminology.  You see because the title cards were “informative”, the nudity and murder was OK.  (Esper did the same thing with Reefer Madness.)  Esper’s directorial style is a little flat and stagy, but the constant close-ups of the mad doctor’s face superimposed over shots of devils (stolen footage from Haxan) are really effective.

While it may seem a little tame by today’s standards, Maniac is one of the earliest exploitation movies ever made and therefore it comes highly recommended.  There’s murder, nudity, catfights (one between two women and another involving actual cats) and a little bit of gore.  Filmmakers would later take these elements and run with them, but the groundwork was first laid here with Maniac. 

Maniac sits atop of the Video Vacuum Top Ten of the Year for 1934 at the Number One spot.

AKA:  Sex Maniac.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: ATLAS (1961) *

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As published in my book, Revenge of the Video Vacuum)

Roger Corman is probably the thriftiest person in Hollywood.  That didn’t stop him from dipping deep enough into his pockets to film this sword and sandal “epic” on location in Greece though.  Despite the location work (which gets cropped out anyway, thanks to the shitty DVD transfer), Atlas is one of Corman’s weakest efforts.

Proximates (Frank Wolff) is a tyrant who stops sieging a small town long enough to talk a truce with the town elder.  He says that too many people have already died and suggests both sides send their best warrior to fight mano y mano to settle the dispute.  Proximates agrees, but asks for ten days to find the best fighter.  He goes to Mount Olympus where he discovers Atlas (Michael Forest), an accomplished wrestler.  Atlas agrees to fight and easily bests the town’s warrior.  After the victory, Proximates goes around bossing everyone around while his soldiers have their way with the local women.  Eventually, Atlas has enough of Proximates’ shit and leads a rebellion to overthrow him.

I usually have a low tolerance for these sword and sandal flicks from the ‘50s and ‘60s anyway, but Atlas was much worse than most of the genre’s usual offerings.  It’s a total snoozer from start to finish, and the pacing is pretty much nonexistent.  Just when you think the movie can’t get any duller, along comes one of the most boring courtroom scenes ever filmed to completely take the wind out of its sails.

It also doesn’t help that Atlas himself is a complete joke.  He spends most of his time standing around, and doesn’t do anything remotely heroic until about the last reel.  Some hero.

The battle sequences are lame too.  There are a lot of scenes of people standing and waving swords around that are just pathetic.  Apparently Corman hired 500 extras for the battle scenes, but only 50 showed up.  Even if the extras did show up, I’m not sure it would’ve added much to the movie because of Corman’s haphazard staging of the “action”.

Wolff is pretty awful as the villainous Proximates.  He minces about for 80 minutes and never once seems threatening at all.  I will give him credit for turning the Ham Meter up to Shatner Level, but for the most part, he’s thoroughly irritating.  He does get one funny exchange with a guard though:  

Guard:  “You wanted to see me?”

Proximates:  “No!  I wanted to see your great aunt Helen from Lesbos!”

I did have fun spotting Corman regular Dick Miller as a glorified extra, and even Corman himself in a bit part dressed as a centurion, but that’s about where the fun ended.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: SKI TROOP ATTACK (1960) **

FORMAT:  DVD

Roger Corman passed away a while back and I never got around to doing a proper tribute to him.  If anyone typified the Video Vacuum ideology of quantity over quality, it was Corman.  When I was working my way through this ten-movie bargain bin collection of Corman films, I decided this would be the ideal place to acknowledge his passing.  Of the films on the set, Ski Troop Attack was the only one in the mix I hadn’t seen before.  As it turned out, it wasn’t exactly the best one to work as a tribute as it’s kind of an atypical Corman picture.  (It’s a war movie done on a shoestring budget.)  I mean, I know he was one of the thriftiest men on the planet, but with Ski Troop Attack, he tosses in enough stock footage to make Ed Wood’s head spin. 

American troops are behind enemy lines in Germany.  The green Lt. Factor (Michael Forest) butts heads with the mouthy Sgt. Potter (Frank Wolff), who despite his lower rank, has more experience in the field.  He also has an itchy trigger finger, which could sabotage their supposedly stealth mission.  As the outfit presses on to their final objective of blowing up an enemy bridge, tensions mount.  Will they ever put aside their differences and work together as a team?  What do you think?

Corman was working with an obviously low budget, and while he tries to give it a bigger feel of an A-List war picture, he isn’t quite able to pull it off.  Scenes of soldiers on skis shooting enemies sort of play like a precursor to the climax of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but on a much smaller scale.  They’re not bad or anything, but they’re too few of them to make it all worthwhile.  Most of the time though, the action just resembles a bunch of kids playing soldier in the woods on a snow day. 

If I’m being completely honest, Corman’s war movies are typically the least interesting.  Other than the overuse of stock footage, there’s not much here that’s all that amusing.  The drama is strictly second rate, and the action is a mixed bag at best.  It is fun seeing Corman playing a German ski soldier though.