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If there’s such a thing as “a typical Roger Corman film”, this might well be it: a low budget, a game cast, a clever concept, and some ludicrously adorable monsters.

ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS (1957)

Following the disappearance of a team of scientists from a small Pacific island, where they were investigating the effects of nuclear fall-out, a second team arrives to find no clue to their predecessors’ fate, beyond some mysterious notes in a journal. But as gruesome accident piles on top of gruesome accident, the researchers realise that a terrible force has been unleashed on the island – a force intent on revenging itself upon any human being who ever tied on a bib and went for the finger bowl…

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I mean, sure I’ve been busy all through November with NaNoWriMo (and find myself slipping toward failure at the end — or, at best, non-success), but even such commitments have to take a back seat to a roundtable honoring our patron saint.

Although with the movie I chose at random, “honoring” might be an overly strong word…

SHE GODS OF SHARK REEF (1958)

I know that after that avalanche of Roger Corman reviews, you seriously need a dose of good taste. That explains why I am reviewing the Richard Chamberlain-starring adaptation of The Count Of Monte Cristo, which also stars Tony Curtis, Trevor Howard, and Donald Pleasence. Never say that The Unknown Movies doesn’t look out for readers of The B-Masters Cabal page.

MY LITTLE PONY: THE MOVIE

Once more, I delve into a place where man should not go, and it’s full of ponies.

Why do all of the ponies have tramp stamps? Why do I care if the Smooze gives them PMS? WTF is up with the Bushwoolies? Why am I watching this?

Review Snippet:
One of my biggest complaints about the ponies is that all of them have tramp stamps. No, I’m not kidding. Each and every My Little Pony has a design on both sides of their hindquarters that corresponds to their name. So, the name and tramp stamp are connected. North Star has a compass rose on each cheek, Shady has sunglasses for a tramp stamp, and Sweet Stuff has muffins tattooed all over her butt. What would you think of a girl with muffins on her fanny who wants you to call her “Sweet Stuff?” I’ll tell you what you’d think, and it involves sneaking out before she wakes up and never calling her again.

Lesson Learned:
I need to watch more movies with radioactive mutants, killer robots, and RANDOM GRATUITOUS BREAST SHOTS.

DAY THE WORLD ENDED (1955)

The first science fiction film directed wholly and declaredly by Roger Corman opens with the inevitable happening – what was inevitable for 1955, anyway.

In the wake of nuclear war, a handful of survivors hole up in a house huddled in some lead-containing Californian hills, where they ride out the apocalypse by talking, arguing, talking, contemplating reproduction, talking, fighting, talking, swimming, talking, drinking, talking, mock-stripping, talking, murdering, talking, smoking, talking, mutating, and talking.

I’d like to say that from time to time a hideous atomic mutation wanders in to liven up the proceedings, but that would only be a half-truth.

WILD WILD PLANET

One of the most frequently seen of Wild Wild Planet‘s design elements is the sprawling model that stands in for Gamma City, the futuristic Earth metropolis that the Gamma One crew calls home. Again, the model fails completely to trick the eye, looking more like a space age train set, or a high school science fair diorama depicting a city of the future, than the awe inspiring super city it’s meant to represent. But nonetheless, Marghereti’s insistent employment of it as a means of orienting us within the story (he seems to cut to a lingering establishing shot of the model between almost every scene) combines with the complimentary, set-bound artificiality of the actors’ environments to successfully envelop us within the film’s quirky enclosed reality, thus making us that much more receptive to the various and sundry eccentricities of the story itself. In this way, the feel of the movie overall struck me as being not unlike that of the sci-fi marionette adventures of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, which similarly disarm skepticism by drawing their viewer into a meticulously constructed, Santa’s toy shop version of reality.

CIRCADIAN RHYTHM

The incompetence in Circadian Rhythm is present on just about every level, but in a way that is…professional? Maybe? Some of the direction is actually inventive and eye-catching. Like, it’s not incompetent in the same way as a shot on video micro-budget horror film made by stoned horror fans. It’s be better if it was. It’s more like a really tedious, over indulgent, pretentious film school student’s final project. Maybe that’s why even places that specialize in reviewing obscure and ignored no-budget movies seem completely mum on the existence of Circadian Rhythm. Nothing works, nothing comes together, and none of it fails in a way that generates any interest even as an enjoyable train wreck.

CHERRY 2000

If Neon City is an example of American-made post-apocalyptic science fiction that strives for a more realistic, bleaker tone than is usually seen in Road Warrior rip-offs, then Cherry 2000 is a very interesting companion piece that comes from the opposite end of the spectrum. It envisions a future not terribly different from the one in Neon City — in which some manner of apocalyptic disaster has left large swathes of the United States lawless and scoured, while pockets of urban civilization seem to chug along despite the blight surrounding them — but where Neon City is an exercise in bleakness and some cursory attempt at realism, Cherry 2000 gleefully embraces all the excess, quirks, and questionable art and design decisions that embodied the 1980s, resulting in a film that comes across sort of like a post-apocalypse film as imagined by Patrick Nagel.

After having watched the Roger Corman-directed Gas-s-s-s, about the only positive thing I can say about it is that it gave me the inspiration for several possible titles for this post. Besides “It ain’t a gas”, I also considered using “A bad case of gas”, “This gas smells like methanethiol”, “Send it to the gas chamber”, and “I’ve got gas pains”. Feel free to submit your own suggestions.

SPLIT SECOND

While he was honing his skills as a guy you’d fall for even though you knew at the end of the day he’d probably cut out your heart and eat it while saying something spooky and profound, he was also working diligently on a second persona: that of a cranky, world weary hero who seems to mutter or sigh all his lines. His first big stab at this was in the do-nothing 1980s actioner Wanted: Dead or Alive, best known — if it is known at all — for being the movie where Rutger Hauer blows up a guy from KISS. In 1989, he took his world weary sighing hero act into the near future for Blood of Heroes, a movie where he got to make out with Joan Chen and slam skulls onto spikes. By 1992′s dystopian futuristic serial killer alien (!) movie Split Second, he had either become so good at acting bored that he seemed totally bored with the movie, or he was totally bored with the movie.

It’s all sci-fi, all month at Teleport City, and this is the right way to kick it off:

MISSION STARDUST

Mission Stardust is the only film to be based on the long running and voluminous series of German pulp novels featuring the science fiction hero Perry Rhodan. It is universally hated by Perry Rhodan fans for the very good reason that it is quite terrible — that is, if you’re definition of “terrible” can be stretched to encompass a film featuring amusingly smarmy, two-fisted astronaut heroes, a truly swankadelic soundtrack, some quite good looking women, pop art set design, and a climactic sequence that finds sexy nurses with machine guns doing battle with robots who shoot lasers out of their eyes.

And coming in just before we devoted ourselves entirely to science fiction for the month of November…

FIREBALL

Fireball teaches us the valuable lesson that you shouldn’t try to solve your problems by competing in a brutal and dehumanizing bloodsport tournament; you should solve your problems by shooting people in the face.

Or at least, blog visitor Ed did, back when I reviewed Zombi Holocaust So you can blame him.

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CONTAMINATION (1980)

This, the third panel in the Ian McCulloch Triptych, finds our hero playing an alcoholic ex-astronaut, drummed out of the service after returning from a mission to Mars babbling about a mysterious light and a cave full of green, football-sized, egg-like objects.

Two years later, an apparently abandoned ship floats into New York City Harbour. On board are the mutilated bodies of the crew, while the hold is found to be full of strange green objects. When disturbed, these objects burst and shower anyone nearby with a fluid that makes them swell up and explode.

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The job of saving the world from this peculiar alien invasion falls to the boozy astronaut, the feisty female colonel who cashiered him in the first place, and a mouthy NY cop who for obvious reasons keeps having his self-deprecating remarks taken at face value.

In other words, the greatest trio of superheroes since The New Justice Team.

[No boobs, but some blood and guts - so probably NSFW.]

Some day, I will settle on a Teleport City design and stick with it. This one’s closer than most to being mildly acceptable to me. Anyway, usher in my endless George Lucas style fiddling with:

MOON ZERO TWO
England’s Hammer Films had the misfortune of releasing their nicely decorated but somewhat tepid science fiction romp Moon Zero Two in the wake of 1968′s two big genre-changing films, and as a result, Hammer’s effort comes out looking decidedly small scale and quaint. But perhaps even more crushing, Hammer released their breezy little moon adventure movie in 1969 and wound up competing directly with the actual Apollo moon landing. While a vision of the moon that included scantily clad dancing girls and scotch dispensers appeals to a certain sensibility, in the end, Moon Zero Two just couldn’t beat out Neil Armstrong actually hopping around on the surface of the moon, even though the real moon ended up not having any dancing girls or scotch — at least, one assumes, up until Alan Shepard got up there with his golf clubs.