Russia Legend

 

 (imdb)

THE SWORD AND THE DRAGON-1956-This tale is based on a legend. Ivan (Boris Andreyev), a man crippled since birth watches helplessly as the Tugars, a barbarian horde rape, pillage and burn. Some travelers give Ivan a magic elixir that restores him and he becomes a mighty warrior dedicating his life to defending his homeland and defeating the Tugars. After battling and capturing a wind demon and assembling a group of fighting friends, his pregnant wife is kidnapped. Tugar leader Kalin (Shukur Burkhanov) wants to make her his bride but she rebuffs him. 

Instead, he takes her son Little Falcon and raises him as a Tugar. Later Ivan and his son meet on the battlefield and Ivan shows his son what's going down. They join forces and have to battle a three headed dragon in the finale. 

The Russian color fantasy is based on poems about the knight Iiya Muromets. Roger Corman got a hold of it a few years after it was made and had it re-edited, changing some names and having news journalist Mike Wallace do some new narration and Paul Frees dub some voices. The director Aleksandr Ptushko also made another fantasy adventure around this time, THE DAY THE EARTH FROZE.

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Harryhausen

  (imdb)

EARTH VS THE FLYING SAUCERS-1956-Dr. Russell Marvin (Hugh Marlowe) and his wife Carol (Joan Taylor) have a UFO encounter. Later while overseeing Project Sky Hook, Marvin's father-in-law General Hanley (Morris Ankrum) advises him to cancel a scheduled rocket take off. Aliens land and metal robots cause some destruction. It seems their original message was misunderstood so they attacked. Later Martin and Carol, Major Huglin (Donald Curtis) and a police officer (Larry Blake) are taken aboard a saucer. There they see Hanley has been abducted and become the aliens' unwilling spokesman. They want to make Earth their new home as their world is dying. Martin and Prof. Kanter (John Zaremba) invent a sonic gun to kill the aliens. While it's being built, the aliens create some explosions on the moon and saucers attack DC. One is shot down and crashes into The Potomac. The Washington Monument and The Capital are among the buildings destroyed. Mostly caused by the shot down UFOs. 

The SFX (by the master Ray Harryhausen, who goes uncredited!) are the real highlight of this black and white science fiction film directed by the unheralded super-fast Fred Sears who made 8 other movies in 1956 including ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK and THE WEREWOLF. Thomas B. Henry is an admiral and Paul Frees is the voice of an alien. One of the screenwriters was Curt Siodmak.

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Saturday Night Live Spin-Off?

NOTHING LASTS FOREVER-1984-Strange arty old movie feel (in black & white) fantasy that takes place in an alternate NYC (controlled by The Port Authority!) of the future. A young man named Adam (Zach Galligan; in GREMLINS the same year) wants to be an “artist”. He gets a job watching cars at The Holland Tunnel where Dan Aykroyd plays his boss and lives for a while with his aunt and uncle (Mort Sahl). The film turns color when Adam visits an underground land run by bums and watched over by Father Knickerbocker (Sam Jaffe in his second to last movie). Later he accidentally takes a bus to the moon. Bill Murray plays the ship's captain. In the bus lounge Eddie Fisher performs “O My Papa”! The government sends old people (including King Donovan, his real life wife Imogene Coca and Larry “Bud” Melman) there to shop. Eventually Adam becomes a great pianist and wins the love of a moon maiden named Eloy (Lauren Tom). 

This strange could be a cult film also uses stock footage and silent films and features a cameo by Lawrence Tierney at the end. Paul Frees is the narrator. It was written and directed by Tom Schiller a former writer on Saturday Night Live.

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Animation

 

TWICE UPON A TIME-1983-Weird “Yellow Submarine” inspired animated fantasy has an evil guy (voice of Marshall Efron) who sends nightmares to sleepers wanting to control time by using “the cosmic clock”. So he sends some dumb guy named Mum and his annoying “all purpose animal” to get it. One of the monsters seems to be based on the Ro-Man from ROBOT MONSTER but I found it mostly a waste of time.

 

Paul Frees is the narrator and provides other voices along with Lorenzo Music and Hamilton Camp.

 

One of the directors, John Korty had made the TV movie GO ASK ALICE and later made THE EWOK ADVENTURE. The other, Charlie Swenson later worked on the animated kid's show RUGRATS. George Lucas was one of the producers. According to some online sources several different versions exist.

 

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Hail Atlantis

ATLANTIS THE LOST CONTINENT-1961-While out plying their trade a Greek fisherman Demetrius (Anthony Hall aka Sal Ponti)) and his father rescue Antilla (Joyce Meadows) a bitchy princess ( "Don't touch me. You smell of fish").

Eventually she convinces the superstitious and easily deceived young man to take her back to her home beyond "the pillars of Hercules" which of course turns out to be the legendary Atlantis before it became lost. Somehow they fall in love. After they are picked up by an Atlantean submarine Demetrius is made a slave. Edgar Stehli is Antilla's weak kneed father/king and Ed Platt is the high priest who knows that doomsday is near. Though technically and scientifically advanced (they have a death ray and make human slaves into animal people sort of like in ISLAND OF LOST SOULS) it's an evil and despotic empire. Demetrious battles a giant in the ridiculous ordeal of fire and water to win his freedom and is visited by a blue skinned Neptune in a dream sequence. The scheming Zaran (John Dall) plots with Sonoy the astrologer (Frank DeKova with eye patch and earring) to attack the rest of the world. Demetrious leads a slave uprising just as Atlantis is destroyed but he and his love get away. Berry Kroeger is a scientist ("Why do they always take my best specimens away?" ) and Gene Roth has an un-billed role (and if you had to wear the embarrassing head gear he wears you'd want to be un-billed too!).

William Smith, Jay Novello and Nestor Paiva are also in it with Paul Frees narrating. This George Pal directed fantasy is very entertaining and imaginative but not nearly on the budget of his previous effort THE TIME MACHINE. Some action scenes were lifted from Pal produced THE NAKED JUNGLE and QUO VADIS. It's based on an English play.

Thanks to my pal Tony for getting me this and thanks for reading!

Rock and Religion

THE WORLD’S GREATEST SINNER-1962-Rock god or sinner? 

Bored insurance salesman Clarence Hilliard (Timothy Carey) quits his job to write a book. That doesn’t work out so after seeing a rock band perform (the musician looks like he’s 12 years old) he decides to start his own group and throw some bible thumping in besides. He stands on street corners with his faithful friend Alonzo (Gil Barreto) and gets some followers (one of them is Titus Moede, later in some Ray Dennis Steckler movies).

He forms a kind of cabal with a bunch of nitwits to devise a plan (“Let’s be different. Let’s not hate anybody”). He seduces an old lady for money then dons a phony goatee and plays some numbers with his band (it’s very noisy) and shakes and yells like he’s having a fit. He preaches a loony kind of Nietzsche like philosophy that man is the only god and his followers run riot in the town. After his followers start calling him “God” the devil (who also narrates) visits him and convinces him to enter politics (“Just get rid of your guitar, Clarence”). He starts “The Eternal Man’s Party” and a montage of scenes depict how he’s corrupted by sex and power while campaigning as “God” Hilliard. After he loses the election it all goes down the drain and he cracks up, loses his family and blasphemes God. In the finale the devil as a snake is super-imposed around his body and the screen turns red negative!

For years I read all sorts of stuff about this movie. Michael Wheldon of “Psychotronic Video” fame gushed over it many times. It is entertaining. If more people get to see it (TCM showed one night at 2 AM) it could become the "PLAN 9" of the21^st Century!

Star Carey (a familiar and weird character actor who had scenes in the bigger budgeted films HOUSE OF NUMBERS and CONVICTS 4 the same year) wrote, produced and directed. It’s badly edited and some of the acting is quite funny. In his scenes before he becomes “God” Carey seems like he’s drunk. Paul Frees is the voice of Satan.

Frank Zappa wrote and performed the theme song and some incidental music is also obviously his (some of it sounds like his “Holiday In Berlin”, a theme he used many times over).

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Fungus Among Us!

SPACE MASTER-X-7-1958-A scientist with marital problems (Paul Frees, better know for this vocal narrations than his on screen acting) gets some “space fungus” off a US probe (The Space Master) and brings it home to experiment on. Unfortunately while he’s doing this he keeps getting interrupted by his ex-wife (Lyn Thomas) who wants custody of their child. Eventually the fungus kills him and escapes but the government seems to contain it until they learn the wife had been in the house too. Bill Williams (who was in a TV series DATE WITH THE ANGELS at the time) is in charge of finding her.

Along the way he meets Moe Howard playing a helpful cab driver (“Ya know she had eyebrows like you pull out with pliers”) and Thomas B. Henry is a professor.

It's like a low budget science fiction version of Elia Kazan's PANIC IN THE STREETS in a way because once the fungus is contained it's really just a hunt for the infected woman. I thought the story could have been better since the screenwriters were George Worthington Yates (EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS, THEM!) and Daniel Mainwaring (INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS).

Director Edward Bernds made many 3 Stooges shorts (and later acouple of the "new" Stooges movies), the underrated Sci-Fi WORLD WITHOUT END and Bowery Boys comedies. He died in 2000 at 94!

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Fish Tale

THE INCREDIBLE MR. LIMPET-1964-This was the first feature movie Don Knotts made after leaving THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW. It's a mixture live action and animation and aimed at both kids and adults. The former Barney Fife plays Henry Limpet, a meek bookkeeper with a nagging wife (Carole Cook) and an abnormal love of fish. It's the early '40's and he's come up 4-F in the draft. When his obnoxious brother in law (Jack Weston) comes home on leave from the navy he gets even more unhappy. When they go to Coney Island Limpet falls in the water and somehow becomes a (animated) fish (with glasses). He meets Crusty the Crab (voice of Paul Frees) and falls in love with Ladyfish (voice of Elizabeth Macrae). Eventually he helps The Navy sink Nazi U-boats.

Despite that premise it's harmless fun but it really feels like the first installment of a continuing series as the whole movie is basically a flashback and it ends with Chief Naval officer Andrew Duggan and Weston looking for Limpet in the present day. However no sequel was ever made. One can only wonder what a remake could be like...(one was announced at the time of this writing). Some songs are also featured.

Larry Keating plays another Naval officer and Oscar Beregi is Nazi captain. Director Arthur Lubin made the first 5 movies with Abbott & Costello, BLACK FRIDAY with Karloff & Lugosi, the 1943 version of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, several in the Francis, the talking mule series and lots of TV (including MR. ED!).

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