Killers From Space (1954)

Killers From Space is a mildly amusing piece of 1950s American sci-fi silliness. It does manage to combine the alien invasion genre with the giant bug genre, so that’s something in its favour.

Dr Doug Martin (Peter Graves) is a nuclear scientist observing the latest nuclear test from a two-seat fighter jet. After the detonation he sees a strange fireball (not a fireball from the blast) then he remembers nothing until he walks back through the gates of the local air force base. In fact his plane crashed and the pilot was killed. It seems impossible he could have lived through the crash, but here he is. Apparently normal.

Well, almost normal. He does seem a bit jumpy, and where did that strange scar on his chest come from? It looks like the scar from an operation, but he’s never had an operation in his life. Both the doctors and the FBI are worried about. They think he may now be a security risk.

After behaving particularly oddly he is given a dose of truth serum, and tells his strange story. He awoke after the crash in an underground cavern and discovered that he had died in the crash. The aliens tell him this; the aliens who brought him back to life. Now they want his help. They want information about the next nuclear test.

Dr Martin soon finds out just what the aliens’ intentions are. They are going to invade the earth after eliminating its present inhabitants by means of giant bugs and lizards. Dr Martin has been hypnotised by them and has no choice but to obey their orders.

Now he has recovered from the hypnosis, but how to make people believe his story?

The aliens apparently draw their power from atomic tests, but strangely enough they also rely on electricity provided by the power company. If Dr Martin can find a way of cutting off their power there may be a chance of stopping them. Unfortunately everybody in authority is convinced that Dr Martin is crazy.

The aliens are especially goofy-looking with huge eyebrows and giant bug eyes. The special effects are ultra-cheap; in fact everything about this movie is ultra-cheap. The giant bugs are just regular bugs.

This is not just an alien invasion movie and a giant bug movie; it’s also an alien abduction movie (and it may be the movie that kicked off the whole “aliens performing operations on abductees” thing).

Peter Graves is pretty bad, although he’s better than the rest of the cast. W. Lee Wilder does a rather pedestrian job of directing. The script is pleasingly silly with plenty of the technobabble that fans of this genre (myself definitely included) love so much.

The Region 4 DVD that I saw was a public domain disc and it is truly abysmal. Picture quality is atrocious and the sound cuts out completely in places. Luckily it was a rental. You wouldn’t want to pay more than a dollar for a public domain copy of this movie.

The movie itself is fun in the manner of low-budget 50s sci-fi and if you enjoy that sort of thing it’s worth a look.

The College Girl Murders (1967)

The College Girl Murders (original German title Der Mönch mit der Peitsche), released in 1967, is one of the later German Edgar Wallace krimis and was directed by Alfred Vohrer (who helmed most of the best movies in this genre for Rialto Studios).

The crazier these krimis got the better they were and this one is crazier than most. It opens with a mad scientist who has just invented a new lethal gas. He sells it to a criminal gang, but the payoff he receives is not what he expected.

Soon afterwards a series of murders takes place at an exclusive girls’ school in England. The murders appear to be the work of a madman, but the audience knows that they are carried out by a man who is in prison. With the help of corrupt prison guards he is able to leave his cell each night to carry out the murders.

The killer is employed by a mysterious man whom he never sees, a man who has a fondness for aquatic animals like sea turtles and crocodiles. He’s a classic diabolical criminal mastermind, but just what is it he is trying to achieve?

This is a tough case for Inspector Higgins (played of course by Joachim Fuchsberger), and it’s made even more difficult because his boss at Scotland Yard, Sir John, has just completed a course in criminal psychology and insists on interfering in the case with his hare-brained psychological theories.

There is a mysterious red-robed figure who is described in the English dubbed version as a monk although he looks more like a Ku Klux Klansman in red. There are also lethal Bibles and guns that fire deadly gunk at unsuspecting victims. The body count is extremely high in this movie, but that’s fairly typical of this genre - you never get just one murder in a krimi, and in this one a large proportion of the cast gets bumped off in various bizarre ways.

There’s a plethora of suspects for Inspector Higgins to deal with, including a writer who takes an excessive interest in the girls at the school and a chemistry teacher who takes an even more excessive and unhealthy interest in the girls. Either could be the criminal mastermind, but then so could the gardener or the headmistress. Or just about anyone else. Everyone seems to have something to hide.

Joachim Fuchsberger is as reliable as ever and the supporting cast is excellent. Strangely enough Eddi Arendt is not on hand this time to provide comic relief, so these comic duties are assumed by Siegfried Schürenberg as Sir John, with his half-baked psychological theories. Luckily he is actually quite amusing.

This particular movie was, unlike the earlier entries in this cycle, made in colour. This is actually the first krimi I’ve seen in colour.

There are some nice visual touches (as you expect in a movie directed by Alfred Vohrer) and some fairly cool sets which include a cage suspended above hungry crocodile and a swimming pool with underwater windows which allow for some clever underwater scenes.

There’s plenty of fun to be had in this movie and if you’re a fan of the Edgar Wallace krimis you’ll want to see this one. If you haven’t yet discovered the joys of this genre then it’s about time you did although, as good as this movie, you’re probably better off starting with the earliest of them, such as the wonderful Fellowship of the Frog (Der Frosch mit der Maske).

Dark Sky’s DVD release boasts a lousy pan-and-scanned English-dubbed transfer of which they should be ashamed. Sadly this is a genre that is rarely available in decent transfers with English subtitles although there are a few German releases that are excellent and that do include English subtitles.

The movie can be thoroughly recommended. This DVD release cannot, but unfortunately it’s the only chance you’ll get to see this movie in an English-friendly version.

The Hypnotic Eye (1960)

The Hypnotic Eye is both a crime mystery and a horror film which (within its B-movie limitations) straddles the two genres fairly well. And it’s a lot of fun.

A series of bizarre self-mutilations has terrorised an unnamed city. All the victims are women. One woman set her hair on fire, with fatal results. One woman slashed her face with a straight razor, thinking it was lipstick. Another stuck her face into an electric fan, thinking it was a vibrator. There have been in total eleven strange inexplicable self-mutilations.

Detective-Sergeant Dave Kennedy (Joe Patridge) has been assigned to the case. He’s a nice enough guy, but he’s clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Even when he and his girlfriend Marcia (Marcia Henderson) attend a performance by Desmond, The World’s Greatest Hypnotist (Jacques Bergerac), it doesn’t occur to Dave that maybe hypnotism has been involved (something the audience will take about 30 seconds to work out). This is in spite of the fact that he has a buddy who is a psychiatrist (Dr Philip Hecht, played by Guy Prescot) who uses hypnotism in his practice.

It’s only when Dave and Marcia’s friend Dodie, who also attended the performance, goes home and tries to wash her face in sulphuric acid that the penny finally starts to drop for Dave.

You see, Dave is a sceptic. Even though his psychiatrist buddy has told him how dangerous hypnotism can be in the wrong hands, Dave believes hypnotism is pure nonsense.

After Dodie’s disaster Dave in finally on the trail of Desmond. Marcia is way ahead of him. She’s attended another performance and has volunteered to be hypnotised by Desmond. But Marcia resists being hypnotised, and discovers the first of Desmond’s nasty little secrets. While on stage he secretly gives the most attractive of his female subjects a post-hypnotic suggestion to come and join him in his dressing room after the show. He then takes them out to dinner, and then back to his place to see his etchings.

Marcia thinks she can resist being hypnotised, but she doesn’t yet know about the Hypnotic Eye. No woman can resist the Hypnotic Eye. She also hasn’t yet figured out how Desmond’s little assignations tie in with the self-mutilations, although she soon will. But under the influence of the Hypnotic Eye, will she become the next victim? And will Dave finally put the pieces of the puzzle together in time to save her? The audience will certainly have solved the puzzle long before Dave does.

This movie attempted to use some William Castle-style gimmickry to whip up audience interest. In this case the gimmick was HypnoMagic. During a sequence in which Desmond hypnotises his entire audience, the movie audience can join in and become hypnotised as well!

By 1960 standards there are some reasonably horrific scenes. The self-mutilations are fairly graphic.

Jacques Bergerac was apparently a real magician. He certainly wasn’t a real actor but he chews the scenery with enough enthusiasm to make his performance work. Unfortunately not even HypnoMagic can make the performances of the other players interesting.

Despite some inadequate acting and a plot that wouldn’t challenge a five-year-old this is still an insanely entertaining little movie. Plus it has beatniks and beat poetry! Crazy, man, crazy. Another fun feature is the stern warning at the end to never, never allow yourself to be hypnotised by anyone who is not a medical doctor. It’s all great exploitation movie hokum.

Warner Brothers have presented this movie in a superb transfer in their Warner archive MOD series

An odd but thoroughly enjoyable B-movie romp that combines some delightfully campy hypnotism silliness with a serviceable if fairly obvious mystery plot. A worthy addition to the collection of any cult movie enthusiast.

season's greetings

Elke Sommer looks like she’s getting into the seasonal spirit here, and I hope all my regular readers are as well.

Maid in Sweden (1971)

Maid in Sweden, released by Cannon Films in 1971, has one thing going for it, and one thing only - Christina Lindberg. For her fans that will be more than enough, but this is truly her worst movie.

Although it was shot in Sweden it’s actually a US-Swedish co-production and was filmed in English.

It’s a coming-of-age story with an absolute minimum of plot. Which perhaps is just as well, since what little plot there is is rather unsavoury and sadly predictable.

Young Inga yearns for the bright lights of the big city. Life on the family farm seems like a prison sentence. Finally she gets a letter from her sister Greta inviting her to spend the weekend with her in Stockholm.

On arrival Inga finds that Greta is shacked up with a guy called Casten. Greta and Casten’s life together consists mostly of getting stoned, having sex and arguing. Casten is lazy, boorish and generally loathsome. So naturally Greta is hoping that he’ll marry her.

Greta fixes Inga up with a date, one of Casten’s friends who turns out to be even more of a waste of oxygen than Casten. Bjorn’s idea of showing an innocent young girl a good time is to take her out, get her drunk, then take her home and rape her. So naturally Inga falls madly in love with him. But this will be a holiday romance only - Inga must return to the farm after three days of dirty sex with Bjorn.

Lindberg could act, as she proved in later movies such as Thriller: A Cruel Picture and the delirious Japanese costume yakuza movie Sex and Fury. She gets no chance to act in this movie. All she gets to do is to take her clothes off and have sleazy simulated sex. Nobody is likely to complain about her taking her clothes off but the sex is too nasty to be appealing.

Lindberg of course looks stunning. Her lack of acting experience shows but she was always comfortable in front of a camera and the camera always loved her.

Impulse’s DVD release of this movie is truly atrocious. It’s a dreadful fullframe transfer. The colours are washed out, the picture is soft and there’s lots of print damage. It’s about as bad as a DVD release can get.

Maid in Sweden is for Christina Lindberg completists only. She made much better movies than this, and if you have a hankering for seeing her without her clothes on you’re better off going for Anita: Swedish Nymphet which is vastly better than this offering.

In Like Flint (1967)

In Like Flint marked the return of the ultra-cool super spy Derek Flint. The Flint movies were, along with the Matt Helm movies, the most successful of the American attempts at spoofing the 007 series. Made by 20th Century-Fox in 1967, the movie’s biggest asset is star James Coburn.

This time around Derek Flint (Coburn) is called in by his old boss Lloyd Cramden (Lee J. Cobb) at the intelligence agency Z.O.W.I.E. (Zonal Organization for World Intelligence and Espionage). Cramden was playing golf with the president who had asked him to time his swing. It turned out to take three minutes which is clearly ridiculous. Somehow Lloyd Cramden had lost three minutes. He has no idea what this could mean but since it involves the President it obviously has sinister implications. What he doesn’t know is that during those three minutes the president was kidnapped and replaced by an imposter.

Cramden has stumbled upon a plot to take over the world by a group of women led by Elisabeth (Anna Lee). The women want to establish a matriarchy, and the first step is to gain control of a US space facility in the Virgin Islands. Elisabeth has established a beauty farm there as a cover.

Cramden has other problems. Someone within Z.O.W.I.E. is trying to discredit him by setting him up in a compromising situation with a woman. Only Derek Flint can save both Cramden’s job and the world.

Flint as usual has retired from the world of espionage to devote himself to compiling an English-dolphin dictionary, but he temporarily puts this project on hold to help his own boss. He even temporarily abandons his harem (which now comprises only three women - he’s trying to cut down).

In fact there are actually two conspiracies, one by Elisabeth’s all-female gang and another by a high functionary within Z.O.W.I.E. who is double-crossing the women. The plots also involve female Russian cosmonauts as well as a cryo-chamber in which Flint’s harem gets imprisoned. There’s a very amusing scene on a Cuban airliner which has fun with the idea of how an airline would be run in the Caribbean socialist paradise.

The visual set-pieces are less spectacular than you might expect but there are the expected hordes of bikini-clad girls. The beauty farm is fun. The plot gets more than a little confusing but then it is a spy movie and that pretty much goes with the territory.

Coburn is in sparkling form which is just as well since the rather threadbare script and Gordon Douglas’s rather limp efforts as director will mean that he has to largely carry the movie. Which he manages to do with his customary style. We also get to see Derek Flint as a ballet star.

Anna Lee has fun as the would-be ruler of a global female empire. Lee J. Cobb relishes the opportunity to ham it up as Cramden.

Fox have done a splendid job with the 16x9 enhanced transfers of the two Flint movies. They both look terrific and the set is very reasonably priced.

In Like Flint is a little disappointing compared to the first Derek Flint movie but Coburn’s performance still makes it a must-see for 60s spy spoof fans.

I've also reviewed the first Derek Flint movie, Our Man Flint.

Battle Beneath the Earth (1967)

Battle Beneath the Earth is an amazingly entertaining exercise in inspired sci-fi silliness. Made in 1967, it can actually be seen as a combination of Bond-style spy movie and science fiction.

The movie starts with a scientist, Arnold Kramer, being admitted to a psychiatric hospital after the police find him listening to noises beneath the streets of Las Vegas. He tells them that there are people down there, people like ants, tunneling beneath the earth. They decide he’s obviously crazy, but he isn’t. There really are people tunneling down there, and they’re Chinese communists planning to invade the United States by means of a system of tunnels dug beneath the Pacific Ocean.

When a series of unexplained mine disasters occur both seismologists and the military start to take notice. Kramer’s friend, Commander Jonathan Shaw, works in a Navy research establishment and he realises that there is something sinister going on underground. A Navy team descends into one of the mine shafts that had been the scene of unexplained cave-ins and they discover not just a vast system of tunnels, but hundreds of Chinese soldiers. And atomic warheads!

The diabolical genius behind the plan is a renegade Chinese general determined to conquer the US. Kramer, now released from the psychiatric hospital, joins Shaw as they work to stop this deadly threat.

It’s a wonderfully crazy idea but the movie plays it fairly straight. There are battles beneath the Earth as the Americans race to head off this threat. The Chinese have sophisticated tunneling machines and now the Americans must work hurriedly to produce their own tunneling machines.

The tunneling machines are a combination of tunneler and armoured tank and they’re the highlight of the film. The sets and special effects are surprisingly (for what is a fairly low-budget movie) reasonably impressive.

Kerwin Mathews as Commander Shaw is an effective hero. For a movie that features dozens of Chinese characters there is not a single Chinese actor in the cast! The makeup on the European actors involved in less than successful although it does succeed in making the crazy Chinese general and his top scientist look suitably sinister. The cast also includes Ed Bishop (one of my favourite actors who enjoyed more success in Britain than in his own country).

I love the fact that the psychiatric hospital in Las Vegas has slot machines in the patient lounge. History buffs will be vastly amused by the fact that the Chinese officers all drive bright yellow Kubelwagens!

This 1967 production was the last movie made by veteran Irish director Montgomery Tully who made some very interesting noirish crime thrillers for Hammer back in the early 50s. He approaches the material in a rather straight way which of course makes it even more entertainingly silly. He does succeed in keeping the action moving along briskly - this movie does not suffer from the slow pacing that afflicts so many 1950s and 1960s sci-fi movies.

The Chinese commander, General Chan (Martin Benson) comes across as the sort of diabolical criminal mastermind that you expect in a Bond movie. His excessive performance is one of the movie’s strengths.

This movie was released by Warner Home Video in a two-movie pack paired with The Ultimate Warrior, a movie I’ve never heard of and haven’t yet seen. It’s a nice 16x9 enhanced widescreen transfer.

The sheer outrageousness of the central idea makes Battle Beneath the Earth a classic B-movie. Recommended.