Mr. BIG is 100!

 It was director Bert I. Gordon's 100 birthday a couple of days ago. Let's celebrate!

EARTH VS. THE SPIDER-1958-A small town has a spider problem. Two teenagers Mike (Gene Persson) & Carol (June Kenny) searching for the girl's father (Merritt Stone) stumble into a cave where a giant spider is nesting. They escape and warn the sheriff (Gene Roth) who scoffs. A school professor Art Kingman (Ed Kemmer) convinces the sheriff the threat might be real. A whole group goes out to the cave. They find Carol's dad's corpse and the giant spider. They think they kill it with DDT and Kingman convinces the sheriff to bring it back to the school to be studied. It's locked away in the gym but Hugo the janitor (Hank Patterson) allows bass playing Sam's (Skip Young) rocking combo to rehearse there and their swinging rock & roll brings the creature back to life! It wrecks the town endangering everyone including Kingman's wife (Sally Fraser) and their kid. Stupidly Mike and Carol go back to the cave to look for her lost bracelet. Unfortunately the spider heads back there. They get lost and the town plans to dynamite the cave. 

Mike's dad Mr. Simpson (Hal Torey) owns a movie theater that's showing THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN & ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE both directed by SPIDER's director Mr. BIG himself Bert I. Gordon. There's also a scene of a teenager reading “Famous Monsters Of Filmland” number 1! 

The strange part of this story (forgetting that there's a normal sized spider blown up to look gigantic on the screen) is that Kemmer's character of Kingman is really responsible for all the the destruction and death. Co-screenwriter Lazlo Gorog also penned THE MOLE PEOPLE. George Worthington Yates, the other screenwriter scripted several other Mr. BIG movies and THEM!

Thnaks for reading and thanks to Mr. BIG. Hope you had a nice day!

Moe and Larry and Curly Joe

 

 HAVE ROCKET WILL, TRAVEL-1959-The Three Stooges (Moe, Larry and Curly Joe) are maintenance men for a NASA like rocket foundation headed by JP Morse (Jerome Cowan). Inga Naarvey (Anna-Lisa) heads the project and admits she's “married to science” when psychologist Ted Benson (Robert Colbert; later in Irwin Allen's "Time Tunnel on TV) suggests marriage. 

When JP tells Inga the foundation might close down the trio (who have taken a liking to Inga and vice versa) decide to make their own rocket fuel. Moe tries to stuff Larry down a sink and they make a general mess of the place (and JP). They hide out in the supposedly abandoned rocket and when it's accidentally launched, they go into space headed for Venus. 

After some hi-jinx with no gravity they land on Venus and encounter a giant spider and then a unicorn whose horn is stuck in a rock. They help him and he takes them to a city. Along the way they sing a song. Later they meet a talking flying electric car and then a weird robot with multiple arms. It shrinks the trio and puts them in a cage. The machine makes robot doubles of them but they botch up everything as well. Somehow the zany three make it back to Earth and are hailed as heroes. At a party in their honor the stooges wind up making all the party goers fight each other. Their doubles show up too!

This was the "new" Three Stooges first feature length film as the team had a resurgence in the late '50's due to their Columbia shorts being shown on TV. It's also Curly Joe DeRita's debut. He replaced jolly Joe Besser who co-starred in the last series of their short comedies. Though this black and white movie was a box office success Moe didn't like it and really it's that good. Later efforts were much funnier. 

Director David Lowell Rich was a busy TV director who later made many TV movies and the blaxploitation film THAT MAN BOLT. 

https://moviemeltdown.blogspot.com/2018/10/bolt.html

Thanks for reading!

1950's Horror

TARANTULA-1955-This begins with a mutated guy in his pajamas dying in the desert. Later the corpse is examined by Dr. Matt Hastings (John Agar) and the aloof professor Deemer (Leo G. Carroll) who says the cause of death was “agromeglia” but Hastings isn't buying it. Turns out the professor is experimenting with an isotope that can enlarge animals. When Deemer is attacked by another mutant his lab burns down and an experimental tarantula escapes. The mutant dies but not before injecting the professor with the isotope. Deemer's new intern “Stevie” Clayton (Mara Corday) winds up taking care of him when he starts to mutate. The giant arachnid dogs their trail but eventually starts eating cattle and people. Hastings, the sheriff (Nestor Paiva) and a newspaper publisher (Ross Elliot) can't fight it. When the spider knocks out phone lines and terrorizes Deemer and Stevie, Hastings uses dynamite but that fails to do any good. It's up to the Air Force (lead by Clint Eastwood) to get rid of it. Hank Patterson is a hotel clerk and Raymind Bailey is another scientist. 

Jack Arnold directed this fast paced low budget horror sci-fi story with great (for the time) special effects the same year as REVENGE OF THE CREATURE (also with Agar). 

REVENGE's screenwriter Martin Berkeley co-wrote TARANTULA but was soon after blacklisted. Lead actress Mara Corday (still alive at the time of this review) was in another Jack Arnold outing THE MAN FROM BITTER CREEK the same year. Leo G. Carroll's popular sit-com TOPPER ended the year he played the the deformed Prof. Deemer.  

Thanks for reading!

Women In The Moon

MISSLE TO THE MOON-1958-This crazy nonsense is actually a remake of the earlier CATWOMEN ON THE MOON!

A grouchy looking scientist named Dirk Green (Michael Whalen) builds a rocket ship and plans to take it to the moon. The government won’t let him work independently and plan to take over his project in the morning. He decides to go up that night. He recruits two escaped convicts to aid him. Gene (Tommy Cook from TEENAGE CRIME WAVE) is the troublemaker and Lon (Gary Clarke, the teenage werewolf in HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER) is the nice one. Somehow Green’s partner Dayton (Richard Travis, also in MESA OF LOST WOMEN)) and Dayton’s fiancée June (Cathy Downs, also in THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN around this time) get trapped in the rocket with them. Everything goes ok in outer space until Gene decides to put the moves on June (unsuccessfully).

After they hit a meteor shower, Green has a heart attack and dies after spouting some mysterious mumbo jumbo about “my lido”. Eventually they do land on the moon, put on cumbersome spacesuits and meet the local welcoming committee: a bunch of slow moving rock men. The group easily out runs them and hides in a cave. Fortunately for them the caves contain oxygen!

Soon after they meet The Lido (the conveniently blind leader who wears what looks like a candelabra on her head) and her colony of moon maidens (who wear roman type outfits). Lon takes time to fall in love with one of them (Marjorie Helen) but Gene is only interested in their diamonds. To add to their predicament, The Lido plans to marry Dayton off to Alpha (Nina Bara who laughably overacts), the kind of second in command. 

Ya see, Green was actually from the moon and was returning to help the ladies escape before the planet self-destructs. Of course Dayton won’t comply so Alpha kills The Lido and takes over, hypnotizing Dayton to her will in the process. It’s pretty funny when he talks in the trance. June almost gets sacrificed to a dilapidated spider but the crew escapes after all the pretty maidens (and the ugly ones too) die in an earthquake. Gene gets caught between the rock men and the sun’s deadly rays. He won’t drop the bags of diamonds he horded and the sun burns him up. The others return to the ship.





Are you still with me?

MTTM is bad but entertaining. A lot happens in a short time. Bad SFX and acting rule the day. The opening scene sets it all up as the local sheriff stops in the desert to talk on his radio. It’s clear to see he’s standing in front of a painting! You can even see creases in it at the top!

MOON was directed by Richard E. Cunha, a TV cinematographer and director who decided to form his own company and produce horror films. His other efforts like GIANT FROM THE UNKNOWN, SHE DEMONS and FRANKENSTEIN’S DAUGHTER are in the same vein but MISSLE is the most laughable. Still Cunha always manages to add a little sleaze or gore to his story.

Whalen and Downs were both in THE PHANTOM FROM 10,000 LEAGUES. KT Stevens who portrays The Lido was once a child actress named Baby Gloria. “International Beauty Contest Winners” played many of the moon maids or so it says in the credits….



Thanks for reading!