More Morons

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There’s an aesthetic to bad movies.  Some are so bad that they’re good.  Others are just plain bad.  Many years ago, during some Amazon movie sale or other, I purchased a DVD of Morons from Outer Space.  Now, horror comedy is a recognized genre, but sci-fi comedy is a bit harder nut to crack, even though horror and sci-fi are siblings.  Morons sat on the shelf for at least a decade, in case of need.  Having been scammed out of our life’s savings, a Friday evening when my wife said “Pick whatever you want, I’m likely to fall asleep anyway,” scanning the shelves my eye landed on it.  The movie had been distributed by MGM, how bad could it be?  Worse than anticipated, it turns out.  I don’t recall ever seeing an intentional comedy where the entire laugh potential was so misaligned.  There were one or two spoofs that worked, but mostly it dragged and begged to be put out of its misery.

Three aliens, anatomically human, crash land on earth after leaving a crew-mate behind on their deep-space vehicle.  The extended scene of their spaceship tooling down the highway might’ve been funny had it lasted maybe a tenth of the time.  The knock-off of Close Encounters’ use of music to communicate was a little funny.  The alien interrogation missed several potentially humorous opportunities.  The aliens eventually become celebrities while an American commander insists that they be killed because of their threat to life on earth.  Ironically, I’ve often wondered how it would be if aliens who came to earth were badly behaved members of their species.  I can honestly say that that would be better than the way this movie played out.

Meanwhile, the abandoned alien gets a lift with a spooky-looking alien.  In perhaps the funniest scene, the spooky alien asks the human alien his sex.  That part was funny on a couple of levels and showed the potential that the movie might’ve had.  He ends up on Earth and tries to connect with his three shipmates, who are now, literally, rock stars.  When they finally meet up, they summarily dismiss him again, only to be hauled off back to space by a closing Close Encounters parody.  I confess that I am still trying to appreciate bad movies on their own aesthetics.  I’ve seen so many that I added a “Bad movies” category to this blog.  Bad movies are often unintentionally funny.  It’s a different beast when a comedy is unfunny.  Particularly when there was potential there, if it’d only been effectively used.

Reptile Puppet

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I read about Reptilicus, but I can’t remember where.  A monster movie shot simultaneously in English and Danish in 1960, with two different directors, it was universally panned.  Some times you just have to see a bad movie.  This one qualifies.  I actually laughed out loud a time or two.  The idea behind the story holds promise: some animals can regenerate lost limbs, or even entire bodies from a severed piece.  What if a giant reptile could do the same?  The film’s problem is in the execution.  So, a team drilling for copper above the arctic circle—they’re sweating and working with their sleeves rolled up in a temperate forest—hits a frozen animal in the permafrost under the tundra.  Taken to an aquarium in Copenhagen, the animal’s tail is kept frozen until someone leaves the door open overnight.  When it thaws it begins to regenerate.

Once fully formed—and nobody could see this coming—it breaks out and terrorizes Denmark.  There are some scenes thrown in to show off Copenhagen, and the film makes liberal use of stock footage from military exercises.  The dialogue, poorly written, is delivered with wooden earnestness by actors who struggle to be convincing in their roles.  The monster, Reptilicus, is so obviously a puppet that it could scare no-one.  But it’s a monster movie!  Those of us who grew up on such fare sometimes feel a need to go back to the well.  To appreciate a bad movie, I always approach it with a certain hopefulness.  Here I am, over six decades later, watching the film.  If that can happen, perhaps someone will see that publishing my novels isn’t the worst you could do?  It makes for a crooked kind of logic.  

The main thing Reptilicus has going for it is its near indestructibility and its ability to regenerate.  How is it finally destroyed?  We’re not shown.  In one scene the general asks the head scientist, something like, “If we can knock it out, you can kill it?”  Receiving an affirmative answer, they drug the monster and send the scientist off to do his work (after he’s suffered a heart attack).  I’ve read novels where it seems pretty clear that the author was unsure how the resolution actually goes—I’ve painted myself into that corner a time or two, so I know how it feels.  If you’ve got a budget and backers, however, you have to deliver something.  The movie performed reasonably well at the box office, which shows just how indestructible some monsters can be.

Eye Eye

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When trying to be conscientious about not spending too much money on movies there’s always the risk of seeing something cheap.  In the case of The Eye Creatures, not only was it cheap, but it was also a throw-back to childhood.  I remember seeing this one in my younger years, and, not yet old enough to be critical, loving the costumes.  Rewatching it as an adult, where some critical faculties remain, reveals it to be a bad movie.  Poorly written, poorly acted, and poorly financed, it ticks all the boxes.  It’s actually a remake of an earlier American International Pictures film, and AIP wasn’t known for its lush budgets.  To be fair, the film is supposed to be a sci-fi horror comedy, but the comedy isn’t that good.  The unintentional gaffs are.

So, the Air Force is concerned about keeping flying saucers secret.  When an “unfriendly” one lands where the teens all go parking, the Air Force investigates while the eponymous eye creatures terrorize the local kids.  Specifically, they seem bent on revenge against Stan Keyton and his girl, because they ran over one of the creatures.  Keyton gets arrested for manslaughter because the creatures substitute the body of a drifter they killed for the corpse of their own comrade.  The police don’t believe in aliens, of course, and the Air Force denies everything.  Keyton and gal decide, after discovering the the eye creatures explode when exposed to light, to round up the necking kids and wipe out the aliens with their headlights.  They figure nobody will believe them anyway.

Some movie monsters stick with you for decades.  The eye creatures are one example of this.  Simply seeing the movie title reminded me of them, although the only plot point I could remember was that they exploded in the light.  I didn’t recall all the voyeuristic watching of teens making out that the Air Force officers did.  Or the tedious revisiting of the Old Man Bailey character.  One of schlockmeister Larry Buchanan’s films, it was released the same year as his other cheap childhood favorite, Zontar, Thing from Venus.  As much as people like to make fun of makers of such cheap movies, Buchanan gained recognition in the New York Times (as have other makers of schlock such as Roger Corman and William Castle), so there is something to these movies.  For one thing, those of us who grew up in the sixties remember them.  And, if we also remain cheap, we can see them again as adults, and relive a bit of cinematic history.

Remembering Winter

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There’s a deep satisfaction at attaining a goal, no matter how low the bar.  Having rediscovered the “Beast Collection” after looking to see if Snowbeast was on it—it was missing from another DVD collection I have—I determined to watch my way through.  It took two or three months, maybe four, but I finally finished it out with Snowbeast itself.  One of a spate of Bigfoot films from the seventies, this was a made-for-television movie.  Many retrospectives show a movie going up in critical estimation over the years, but this one seems to have sunk down into the “bad movie” category.  But still, of the seven (!) Sasquatch films in the pack, it is clearly the best.  A low bar, as I say, but still, it has the advantage of being relatively well written.  Joseph Stefano, who wrote the screenplay, was one of the minds responsible for The Outer Limits.  He also had credit for writing the screenplay for Psycho. 

Decent writing can help redeem bad movies.  But more than that, you can actually care for the characters.  In some bad movies you have a difficult time raising any feeling for the people portrayed—that’s true for more than one of the other films in this collection.  Here are people that doubt themselves, but have good hearts.  The story isn’t complex (one of the reason modern critics scorn it).  A ski resort in Colorado—much of the movie shows people either skiing or snowmobiling—a young woman is killed by the eponymous snowbeast.  When the owner of the lodge insists on keeping it open for a festival, the current manager (her grandson) is reluctant to kill something that’s so human.  There’s a bit of a moral quandary here, which provides some traction on a slippery slope.

The beast then kills a member of the search and rescue team, and they know they have to destroy it.  The principal characters track it down, and after the beast gets the sheriff, they shoot it.  As I say, not much of a plot, but the characters have some depth.  It’s not a great movie by any stretch, but it doesn’t leave you feeling as if you’d have more enjoyed doing your taxes.  And that’s saying something for a collection of movies that cost less than most single DVDs.  Now if that makes me sound old, keep in mind that this movie was from the seventies.  And even if most re-appraisers think it has grown worse over time, I’m willing to disagree.  After all, I just accomplished something by watching it.

Father of Yeti

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“Always steals women.”  So Subra mutters high in the Himalayas.  Perhaps one of the most unintentionally funny bad movies, The Snow Creature does hold a place in history.  It was the first abominable snowman, or yeti, movie made.  It’s also incredibly cheaply made with a costume that most twelve-year-olds could’ve fabricated better.  As the antepenultimate movie in the “Beast Collection,” I felt obligated to watch it one snowy weekend.  Spouting colonialist and sexist values like a Republican, the story is tedious even at eighty minutes.  But funny at times also.  So a botanist travels to the Himalayas to study plants at 10,000 feet.  His fun is interrupted when a yeti kidnaps the head sherpa’s wife, causing the sherpa to take charge and start to hunt the beast.

The American scientist decides to capture the yeti instead so that he’ll have something to give the foundation sponsoring the expedition.  Leaving behind a female and baby yeti, both killed, he drugs the snowman until a special refrigerated container can be built—gee whiz, Americans can do anything!—to bring the beast back.  And they fly west from Bombay to California, where, when they land the beast is held up in customs (I kid you not).  There’s a debate about whether he’s human or animal and while the debate goes on, the creature escapes.  The hapless police can’t find a seven-foot tall yeti wandering around Los Angeles at night, harassing the women.  Finally they figure he’s using the storm sewers.  They trap him but, alas, have to shoot him.  At this point they completely lose interest in the corpse and exchange meaningless banter as they drive off.

This movie seems to be what the Trump administration wants America to revert to.  Bossing around BIPOC people in their own countries, women being helpless without men to rescue them, and corporations buying what is arguably a human being.  Sounds like a playbook to me.  Also, it was extremely cheap.  What amazed me is that United Artists distributed it.  People must’ve been pretty hungry for entertainment back in 1954.  Having said that, it is worth watching for a laugh.  Now that streaming exists, you can find this free on various services.  If you like very wooden acting, and superior Americans having their way in Asia just because they’re, well, Americans, you might find this a passable way to spend a snowy weekend (wait til winter to watch it; it’ll keep).  Only a word of advice: be sure to lock up your women before you do, because the beast always steals women.

Capture and Release

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Waste not, want not.  I place some stock in old sayings.  With the way things are going, prices are sure to rise and so saving a penny or two may be wise.  So I turned back to my boxed set of “The Beast” for my horror fix.  As I’ve explained before, I bought this DVD set before streaming was a thing, and I was feeling nostalgic for Zontar: the Thing from Venus.  Being a fan of bad movies, it was worth every cent.  The set is actually (mostly) themed around Bigfoot.  I’ve talked about a few of these movies before, and trying to be frugal, I’ve determined to watch the whole set, no matter the cost.  Besides, there’s an aesthetic to bad movies.  The Capture of Bigfoot, no doubt, is a bad movie.  Knowing this before I slipped the disc in, I have no business acting outraged at the poor acting, directing, writing, or any cinematic sins.  Except one: a horror movie can’t be boring.  And Capture is b-o-r-i-n-g.  If you like movies about people slogging through knee-deep snow, this may be for  you.  

What really amazes me is the talent the compilers of such collections have at locating truly obscure bad films.  Now, I have a soft spot for 1970s horror.  Nostalgia carried me through, floating on those seventies’ vibes.  The clothing, especially.  And more particularly, the winter coats.  Although set and filmed in Wisconsin, the winter coats the kids wear in this movie are just like those everybody was wearing in Pennsylvania at the time.  And yes, I trudged through knee-deep snow my fair share of times.  That part just opened the flood gates of memory.  So, the story goes like this…

An evil businessman (I lost track of how many people he killed, or tried to), wants to capture Bigfoot (shown early, in winter white) to put the town on the map.  Paying stooges to go get the beast, he finally builds an elaborate trap that succeeds.  The local game warden, with his girlfriend/wife and her little brother, decide the creature isn’t evil.  Using Batman-style tying skills, bad guy’s henchmen assure that most of his enemies escape to trudge through the snow some more.  A mysterious Indian character tells the game warden that the creature must be set free, which it is.  The evil businessman dies in a fire inside his wicked mine where he’s keeping the beast.  In the end, two families—the warden and the Bigfoot—pay mutual respect.  I do wonder about the mentality of someone making a movie like this.  But then, some forty years later, here I am writing about it.  Win-win. 

Bad Taste

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There is a reason for watching bad movies, apart from the fact that they’re often found streaming for free.  Sometimes that reason is that they’re so bizarre that they’re almost surreal.  And sometimes the circumstances surrounding them are equally strange.  Michael Findlay’s Shriek of the Mutilated was included in the set of movies I bought for Zontar: Thing from Venus.  Not one to be wasteful, I’m finally dutifully watching these before allowing myself to purchase new fare.  Given the fact that this had a theatrical release, I’m surprised that it’s not compared more often with Ed Wood’s oeuvre.  In any case, this is a very convoluted story and spoilers will follow.  You’ve been warned.

An international group of demon worshipping cannibals have a member who’s a professor that takes students on a “yeti hunting” expedition every few years.  The students are all killed but one, so that the yeti story can continue.  Viewers (if any) aren’t clued in to this until the last few minutes of the film but early on you can spot the cannibal theme.  So four students in the professor’s Mystery-Machine-like van, go on a hunt while staying with a “colleague.”  Naturally the students start getting killed.

Using some of the worst dialogue ever written, the clueless coeds keep allowing themselves to be led into situations no sane person would.  The chosen “survivor” discovers the plot and is amazed that the creature was (blindingly obviously) a guy in a suit trying to scare them to death.  The cannibals prefer their meat with no bruises.  Much more could be said about the ineptitude of the movie but it ends up having an interesting, if tragic, coda.

Michael Findlay, who made exploitation films with his wife Roberta, was actually sliced to death in a helicopter accident on top of the (then) Pan Am Building in Manhattan.  This happened three years after this movie was released.  In those three years he’d directed eight more films, so his last movie before being mutilated was not the one in my Beast collection.  Quite often when I watch bad movies I have trouble finding any discussion of them at all.  Shriek of the Mutilated is discussed at some length in two books—not surprisingly published by McFarland (they have great pop culture titles).  Until I discovered this movie, in with ten others in a collection, I’d never heard about it.  Of course, the theatrical release was for drive-ins and was limited to Texas, Florida and California.  There can be a lot of information to dig out when people stoop to talking about bad movies.

Somehow Inevitable

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You had to expect me to write about Zontar: Thing from Venus.  I bought the “Beast Collection” set to see it many years ago.  In those days I tried to watch the movies through, in order but I didn’t make it through the first disc, even.  Well, now my perspective has changed—I figured I bought this to see Zontar, and Zontar I must see.  You do know that he controls people, right?  Zontar is a notoriously bad movie.  I saw it on television as a kid, and it may have even been close to the first run since it was made for television.  It’s actually a remake of a cheap Roger Corman movie, so it is a cheap remake of a cheap original.  Nostalgia, however, does funny things to a guy.  Although I saw it half a century ago, I remembered some lines precisely.  Television does funny things to young minds after all, I guess.

In case none of the injectapods has found you yet, it goes like this: Zontar, from, well, Venus, is a bat-like monster with three eyes.  He befriends an earthling outsider scientist, through laser communication, and commandeering a satellite, which becomes a passable flying saucer, lands in  a cave from which he takes over the small town of Jackson, which has a military base and plans to take over by having a general assassinate the president.  Meanwhile, his scientist friend directs Zontar to the four people that he needs to take over the world: said general, the sheriff, the mayor, and his best friend scientist, Curt Taylor.  Things don’t quite go Zontar’s way, despite most of the movie’s running time showing him totally in control.  It feels like it’s a lot longer than its 80-minute running time.

Still, I have to agree with the TV Guide review that says it isn’t as bad as everyone says.  Yes, it is a bad movie but it does have a few redeeming features.  Some of the scenery is nice, and you even begin to care for some of the characters.  The rogue scientist’s wife—despite her constant nagging—is the first person who tries to kill Zontar, and she does this for love.  When Zontar gets her you feel a little sad.  At least I did.  You see, the injectapods haven’t reached me yet and I still have human emotions.  Ironically, it is just such things that drive me to rewatch movies like Zontar all these years later.  And the movie ends with a voice-over moral of the story.  Those 80 minutes weren’t completely wasted.

The Search Continues

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This movie’s so bad there’s a backstory.  Years ago I was really wanting to see Zontar: Thing from Venus.  This was before streaming, and I found it as part of the “Beast Collection,” a set of 11 movies for less than the price of one regular first-run DVD.  I watched a few other movies in the collection, but before long it got shoved to the back of a shelf and forgotten.  I remembered it recently because another collection I have was missing a movie, Snow Beast.  I wondered if it might be part of this otherwise forgotten set.  It was (this really encouraged me because maybe my memory is still much better than I sometimes suppose).  In any case, one of the other movies—one I’d never seen—was Search for the Beast.  I figured, why not?  This is a film that fails on every level.  And I mean every single one.  It really should merit a Wikipedia page, just for being so bad.

So, a professor in Alabama goes in search of the beast in the Okaloosa mountains.  The budget for the movie must’ve been a matter of pocket change.  Anyway, the beast has been “killing” anyone who ventures into the mountains and the professor wants to prove it exists.  He’s backed by a guy with money, who isn’t explained at all, and his university office is less well equipped than an average undergrad’s dorm room.  He takes a female grad student with him but his financier, unbeknownst to the benighted professor, hires a bunch of beefy guys with assault rifles to go along, although they’re only going to take pictures.  Of course the professor sleeps with the grad student but then the head of the tough guys kidnaps her as the beast kills off the tough guys’ heavily armed posse.  Turns out the local hillbillies are, apparently, trying to mate the beast with the women who come into the woods.  It’s worse than I’m describing it.

There is some chatter on the internet about this groaner, so I’m sure that I’m not the only one who’s seen it.  Someone recently asked me how such movies even get made.  Well, anyone with a camera can shoot a movie.  Of course, getting paid screen time (or video distribution) is another story.  I doubt the makers of this film made much money off of it, but since other suckers like myself have discussed it online, the producer, director, writer, and actor Richard Arledge, has the last laugh.  His work is being talked about, no matter if nobody has a good thing to say about it.  Of course, I wouldn’t have ever seen it at all, if I hadn’t had a hankering for Zontar: Thing from Venus all those years ago. 

Meanwhile, on Earth

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Low budget doesn’t always translate to cinematic disaster, but in The Crater Lake Monster, it unfortunately does.  I have a soft spot for those who attempt to make movies but don’t succeed the way that they’d hoped.  The Crater Lake Monster is poignant in that respect as the production company, Crown International, apparently messed up the financials and insisted on cutting scenes that helped to make a bit more sense of the story.  The actors are certainly not those at the top of their game, but the stop-motion plesiosaur isn’t half bad.  The story itself doesn’t seem to support its tonnage, however.  A meteor crashes into Crater Lake (not the famous one).  Some months later a monster begins attacking people after it eats up all the fish.  There are a handful of characters who are concerned, and some just casually passing through.

The sheriff, at first skeptical, becomes a believer after seeing with his own eyes.  The doctor, who examines a victim’s body, thinks there’s something in the lake.  A couple passing through on their way to Vegas see the monster up close and survive, but their trauma is so great that they can’t talk about it.  A pair of guys who rent out boats to fishers are having trouble because there’s no fish left.  And a pair of archaeologists from “University Extension” insist that the creature should be kept alive since, well, you don’t often come across dinosaurs.  They also figure out that the hot meteorite incubated a fertile plesiosaur egg that had been at the bottom of the lake for millions of years.  There’s even a story of a liquor-store robber thrown in.  The robber’s only tied to the plot by getting eaten by the monster.  The monster is finally killed by the sheriff with a bulldozer.

Some of the people that worked on this film, especially the stop-motion crew, had some recognizable chops in the biz.  One of them had worked on that childhood Christian kids’ show Davey and Goliath, and another was concurrently working on Star Wars and went on to work on Jurassic Park.  Meanwhile, Crater Lake is so bad that it’s a bit surprising that it hasn’t really become a cult classic.  Creature features are a guilty pleasure.  With a bit of coaxing, and financing, this one might’ve been made passable.  Who doesn’t like to see the underdog achieve some success?  Of course, it did come out the same year as Star Wars, with its budget, and clearly couldn’t compete down here on Earth.

Bottoming Out?

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It was an honest mistake, I swear!  I had remembered reading in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre that The Creeping Unknown was worth seeing.  I’d known about this movie under the title The Quatermass Xperiment since I was a tween.  The problem when you grow up with no money in a small town is that you don’t have access to such things.  Then a friend gave me a DVD of The Creeping Terror.  I thought it was The Creeping Unknown.  The disc hadn’t spun too many revolutions before I realized I was watching what may be the worst movie ever made.  Many reserve that for Plan 9 from Outer Space, but believe me, this is much worse.  The story of a couple of aliens sent to eat people to transmit to their superiors what our weaknesses are, it seemed to me that the main weakness is nobody thought to run from this slow-moving monster, except one guy who just abandoned his girlfriend to it. (Apparently girls don’t run.)

Like that other baddie, The Beast of Yucca Flats, the audio was not preserved so nearly all of the film is a voice-over by an authoritative-sounding announcer.  There are a few dubs, but they aren’t well done.  And then extended scenes of young people at a dance (have you ever heard of just filling up time?) are intercut with perhaps the slowest monster attack in history.  There’s so much not to like here.  The poor acting.  The plot nearly as dimwitted as Trump.  The stock footage of a rocket launch run backwards to make it look as if it’s landing.  The sheriff making out with his wife in the patrol car while “on a break” from looking for the monster.  The instrument panels from beyond our galaxy with Arabic numerals and Latin letters.  You find yourself hoping for the Apocalypse so you won’t have to watch the rest, and it’s only 74 minutes long.

Somehow it comes as little surprise that the director (also producer, editor, and star), under the name Vic Savage, disappeared never to be heard of again.  The film’s main financier, had to try to put the movie together for release.  (He also had a role in the movie.)  There is, as I’ve mentioned often before, an aesthetic to watching bad movies.  I’ve ended up seeing many of “the worst of all time” in my spate of movie viewing over the past three or four years.  This is the first time it has happened by mistake.  I do have to say that it’s easier to appreciate a bad movie when you can see that it’s coming and prepare yourself accordingly.  The Creeping Unknown remains elusive.

Not Fantasy

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There’s a reason I watch horror.  One of the many things you can’t find online is how popular movies were before the internet days.  This is an issue for me because I only just now found out about Phantasm, which was released in 1979.  Granted, I lived in a small town, but I did know about The Amityville Horror—everyone knew about The Amityville Horror.  The films were released the same year, but Phantasm was an indie production and probably didn’t have reach into my local region.  Nobody talked about it at school and I only became conscious of it a few weeks ago.  I learned that it was quite a box office success, but the critics didn’t care much for it (and I can see why).  It was, however, rediscovered and has become a cult classic.  I can see that too.  The thing is, it is a bad movie.  I’m learning to appreciate such things.

Part of the reason the film bothered me is that I really dislike “but it was all a dream” endings.  Even though there’s a final suggestion that some of it “really happened,” or Michael is dreaming within a dream, such endings always make me shrug.  Horror, to really work, has to be in that liminal zone between believability while on screen and the deeper knowledge that it’s fiction.  Phantasm just had too many strikes against it to be believable.  The dwarves were lifted straight from Star Wars’ Jawa.  The Tall Man isn’t scary (this is from a current-millennium perspective, granted) and while you’re just trying to get into the horror mood (the music is appropriate) a flying ball of death, a sudden sci-fi element, is thrown in.  Of course, the plot takes a kind of sci-fi turn near the end.  It didn’t, however, do any heavy lifting.

I was surprised to learn that it became a franchise, no members of which I’d ever heard.  It is interesting that speculation exists that the creepypasta stalwart, the Slender Man, was developed from the Tall Man concept.  Given that I was seventeen when this movie came out it might be someone of my vintage—but from a different vineyard—would find Tall Man scary.  Of course, if I’d seen it when it was first out, and in a theater, I might’ve gotten some chills from it.  I could have included it in Holy Horror since there is some Bible in it, but it isn’t used to its full extent for a movie that mostly takes place in and around a funeral home.  There is some comfort in knowing that even if your work isn’t great, it can still be rediscovered if enough time passes.  And there’s good reason to watch it.

Why, Cathy?

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Learning to appreciate bad movies is a skill like any other.  It takes practice.  “Why?” I hear you ask?  Why climb a mountain?  Actually, there is a motive for seeing bad movies, apart from the good feeling they can leave you with.  (I might’ve actually done it better!)  That’s because they’re often free streaming.  If I had an endless budget I might well be able to avoid bad movies, but what’s the fun in that?  I found out about Cathy’s Curse because I was looking for a movie about a cursed doll.  (Don’t ask.)  I’ve seen many, of course.  Child’s Play and the whole Annabelle series.  But I felt I was missing something.  Wikipedia actually has a page on haunted doll movies, and Cathy’s Curse stood out to me.  Yes, I was forewarned, but I was also curious.

A Canadian horror film from 1977, Cathy’s Curse has become a cult classic.  The story line decidedly makes no sense.  Cathy, a young girl, moves into her grandparents’ house with her father and mother.  Her father’s father had died in a car crash with his daughter Laura, about Cathy’s age, some 30 years earlier.  Cathy’s parents are troubled, her mother having recently had a nervous breakdown.  Laura’s vengeful spirit possesses Cathy through a doll the latter finds in the attic.  For some reason, Cathy kills the housekeepers and attacks other children.  She tries to drown herself.  She kills the handyman’s dog.  The dog, which is clearly male, is explicitly said to be female in the movie, perhaps because one of the favorite words of the writer is “bitch.”  After about an hour and a half of running around screaming, the opening of the cursed doll’s eyes suddenly brings normalcy to the house.

There are some genuinely good things about the movie.  The late fall-early winter mood is nicely framed.  Why people hang out outdoors without coats in freezing weather is never really explained, though.  Neither the writing nor the acting are stellar.  And have I pointed out that the story makes no sense?  But still, there’s something there.  The idea of possession, a young girl under threat, the scary old mansion—these are classic tropes.  It’s unclear why, when Cathy’s father is fixing breakfast, he immediately sends her to bed and it’s suddenly night.  Or why the detective calls him by the wrong name.  Or why nobody can take a doll away from a little girl.  Ah, but that’s it, you see.  The haunted doll.  You have to learn how to appreciate these things, you know.

Not Really Free

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I admit that I’m a cheapskate.  When you grow up poor, that comes naturally.  For some of us the myth of scarcity is less of a fable than it is for others.  Perhaps that’s why I like Roger Corman movies.  Or usually do.  And it’s also the reason that I bought the Classic Features Horror Classics DVD set years ago.  50 movies!  And cheap!  Now, in my defense, I bought this collection before streaming was a thing.  I’d become somewhat addicted to horror movies and renting was pricey and hey, fifty movies!  Of course, they’re public domain.  Some of them are pretty bad.  You can stream most of them for free, but with commercials.  I was in the mood for my fellow cheapskate Roger, so I decided to try Swamp Women (it’s in the collection).  Now, why it was considered horror I don’t know.  It must be pretty difficult to find that many public domain movies in any category.  It was just over an hour and I thought of it as homework.

Three tough-talking cons break out of prison with the help of an undercover cop.  They’re all women, of course.  The cop is there to make sure the stolen diamonds they hid are found.  And to get out alive.  This was a very cheap movie.  The writing is puerile and there are plot holes large enough to row a boat through.  Still, it’s a Corman film.  The only real horror comes from an alligator and a snake—it seems that couldn’t afford more than one of each—and it ends up pretty much as you’ve pegged it will once the endless stock footage of Mardi Gras is over.  What I found interesting, after reading a history of American International Pictures, is that even though co-founder James Nicholson was helping Corman raise money for the film AIP didn’t serve as the production company.  After seeing it, it’s pretty clear why not.

The critics gave this a pretty tough time back in 1956, sometimes noting that it did at least attempt some female psychology.  Really the only psychology on display was who might end up with the one guy they decide to keep as a hostage.  When his girlfriend drowns after trying to steal the only boat, he barely frowns.  I was hoping (I try not to read about movies before watching them) that there might be a swamp monster or something.  I mean, swamps and monsters naturally go together, don’t they?  I guess even those putting together public domain movie collections might be a bit cheap from time to time.  All of us skinflints understand each other, I guess.

Who Recommended?

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A couple of things: one-word titles can be confusing, and I need to start writing down where I get movie recommendations.  Trying to live reasonably on an editor’s salary, I can’t afford purchasing movies all the time, so I stream what’s free, now only when it’s on my list.  That’s how I had the misfortune of watching Shiver (2012).  I’m not sure it was the right movie, but I couldn’t find any others by that title near the top of IMDb and I couldn’t remember where I got the recommendation.  Although it uses many standard horror tropes, this flick veers a little too much into torture porn for my liking.  Also it’s very poorly written and many of the scenes are improbable (to put it mildly).  The police are totally incompetent (how many times can a serial killer’s intended victim be assured she’s safe by police when they can’t even get the perp to prison in good order?), almost to a Keystone degree.

And this isn’t some Hannibal Lector, either.  He’s kind of a psychopath that’s been making a living selling jewelry to his eventual victims.  Of course he’s a sexually frustrated guy who was bullied as a kid.  See, there are some moments of trying to establish some kind of social commentary, but the writing and most of the acting keep getting in the way.  The violence toward women goes unremarked, and that’s probably what most requires comment.  So I’m sitting here scratching my head trying to figure out who, or what, might’ve suggested this movie to me.  Or is there a different Shiver?  Did somebody leave the “s” off the end?  (I’ve already seen that one.)  I really do need to keep better records.

Bad movies come in many varieties.  This one was disturbing from any number of angles.  I don’t tend to watch serial killer movies.  Violence against women bothers me a lot.  Every main character had a bad childhood.  (One of the stories is simply told and then dropped.)  It’s a movie that might helpfully come with trigger warnings.  As I watched I wondered.  I wouldn’t been watching this if someone, or some respected publication, hadn’t recommended it to me.  Who and why?  Since I watch movies on weekend mornings, mostly, a bad one can start the day off on the wrong foot.  Someone, or some source, suggested Shiver.  Or maybe someone forgot a letter.  That’s the problem with one-word titles.