We've been spending so much time recently with relatively well-crafted films and books ( more or less...)......we missed taking another plunge into the churning pool of total Movie Madness.......movies that warm our hearts, tickle us into hysterical laughter and force us to scream out loud...."What the hell were they thinking????".........
So here goes.......
Teenagers From Outer Space (1959) First, let's give writer-director Tom Graeff credit for the lunatic idea of shooting an entire feature film like a music video.....with the soundtrack, including all of the dialogue, pre-recorded in advance....
With his embarrassing cast of community-theater actors forced to lip-synch their lines, Graeff managed to make the first American movie that sounds like a foreign film.......(but even this dubious low-tech feat would be trumped five years later by the other film we cover in this post....)
Pity our poor, sensitive outer space teen Derek, part of an alien landing party who plan to use earth as a big breeding ranch for their version of cattle.....Gargans. The Gargans look suspiciously like they were just plucked out of the tank in the waiting area of Red Lobster........okay, they are lobsters........and when the earth's atmosphere turns them into giants.....prepare yourself, they become dark shadows of lobsters.....you can trust that every expense was spared for these special effects...
Young Derek escapes his cruel intergalactic cohorts and heads for Small Town, USA.....but wait....hot on his heels, with a nasty temper and a twitchy ray gun finger, comes Thor (no doubt named that because you can tell he's a Thor loser....).
One blast of Thor's five-and-dime store toy gun turns humans into instant skeletons. And just like the Wicked Witch of The West, he zaps a little dog, too. Meanwhile, those pesky Gargans, now depicted by what looks like black cardboard cut into lobster shapes by first graders, rampage around the outskirts of town.
For we lovers of lower-than low-budget sci fi,.....pure Nirvana. And the wonderful thing about movies like this.......if you think there couldn't possibly exist a more ridiculous film than the one you're watching........you ain't see nothin' yet......
And nothin' arrives with The Creeping Terror (1964), a film so legendary in its total ineptitude that it still holds a beloved place in everyone's hearts as the very abyss of Sci-Fi/Horror cheese.....
The stretch limo-sized monster that comes lumbering out of a spaceship resembles a parade float camouflaged with all the remnants of a going-out-business carpet warehouse. It also features an upright head of sorts, festooned with vacuum cleaner hoses.....
This voracious alien, moving along at about a quarter-mile an hour, has no trouble at all sneaking up on horrified earthlings, most of whom obligingly crawl into the monster's maw head first for ease of devouring......
As hilarious as this is to watch, the film's backstory far eclipses it. The so called 'director', Vic Savage created his own Kickstarter scam, hoodwinking his large, starry-eyed cast of local townspeople-suckers to invest in the movie......(as we write this, they're probably still checking their mailboxes for their profit-participation checks....)
Whether by design or botched post-production, the film has very little
synchronized sound.......an off-screen narrator laboriously drones on, explaining huge chunks of exposition while the actors mouth words at each other.....so the movie sounds like the 16 millimeter educational films our elementary school used to torment us Baby Boomers with.....(as in "How to brush your teeth propery", "How To Survive An Atomic Bomb".....)
But it's all about that wondrously funny Creeping Terror......and after 75 minutes of watching the thing digest the cast members faster than Vic Savage stripped them of their cash, we knew this movie would live forever in our hearts.......
For both these.....uh.....unique achievements.......the BQ fires off the ray-gun for 3 skeletal stars (***).......and please know that rating is not meant for anyone who would take these movies seriously.......it's for the pure, unfettered joy of watching films that approach their own special state of grace......with lobsters and plenty of carpeting......
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