Hi, my name is Ken B.  (“Hi, Ken B.”)  This is my first time posting here.  I’m…a b-movieholic.  (Applause, warm fuzzies.)  Luckily, I have my own Higher Power to help me through this.  Thank you, Jabootu.

Anyhoo, new review: 

Frankenstein vs. the Creature of Blood Cove

For context, I’ve been looking at various Gill Man movies lately, including:

The Beach Girls and the Monster (includes Gill Man history notes)
Destination Inner Space
And, a while back, The Horror of Party Beach

That is all.

The latest at Cold Fusion Video Reviews is Jungle Goddess (1948), a George Reeves/Ralph Byrd B-movie which answers the question, “Just how boring can a white-goddess-in-Africa movie be?”  Otherwise, only notable for the misplaced orangutan (!) stock footage in the African locale.

Braineater looks at two more films by Carlos Enrique Taboada: El Vagabundo en la lluvia (The Drifter in the Rain, 1968) and El Libro de piedra (The Book of Stone, 1969).

And, since my first installment came out just before this blog made its debut, here’s more on one of Mexico’s most accomplished horror directors: Hasta el viento tiene miedo (Even the Wind is Afraid, 1968).

In answer to the question that has plagued me since the founding of And You Call Yourself A Scientist! – namely, “Don’t you ever watch anything else?” – we present a new site section: Et Al. – short reviews of the other films I watch. They’re the reviews I write when I’m not writing a review!

(To access Et Al. from the front page, click on Etc., Etc., Etc…., which is where I’m putting all the stuff I don’t know what to do with. I know, I know: it’s all very technical.)

Newly reviewed: Planet of the Dinosaurs (1978), the low-budget classic known for its lifelike dinosaurs and not-so-lifelike cast. And I blame the current state of movie production for making me feel justified in using the word “classic” here.

Spider Baby, or The Maddest Story Ever Told (1964), in which the scheming relatives are so greedy they don’t even bother waiting for the traditional reading of the will…

Theater of Blood (1973), in which Vincent Price has your ham and cheese right here, jackass!…

 These Are the Damned (1961), in which Joseph Losey crams creepy sci-fi children, depressing Cold War paranoia, and rampaging gangs of teddy boys into one movie, and somehow makes it all work…

and…

A Trip to the Moon (1902), in which a bunch of impressively bearded Frenchmen shoot themselves across the interplanetary void with a big-ass cannon, and beat the crap out of explosive aliens with their umbrellas.

In Shark Kill, a diver and a marine biologist team up to hunt a great white shark that has attacked and killed men working on the pipelines of an oil rig off the Californian coast. This made-for-TV effort is modest in both ambition and execution, but historically important as the first post-Jaws killer shark film.

Kilink Ucan Adama Karsi (1967)
Part three of our presumably four-part look at the Italian and Turkish adventures of master criminals dressed up like skeletons. The second Kilink film is marred by the fact that half the footage is forever lost, but it’s still a wonderful adventure pitting a diabolical villain in a skeleton suit against a guy in a padded suit, cape, Batman’s cowl, and striped panties. Plus, that hot secretary from part one does a slinky dance number while Kilink relaxes on the couch in his lair full of bikini chicks and henchmen in genie pants and Rollie Fingers mustaches.

Wingrave (2007) is billed as the first English-language feature from Egypt (i.e., made by actual Egyptians, not a Hollywood production company that flies in all of its own equipment and actors and hires some locals to haul water). I probably shouldn’t make judgments about an entire hypothetical industry from this one entry, but my reaction can probably be summarized thusly:

“Egypt. It sure ain’t no Turkey.”

A question has come in to a member of our august body (okay, it was me) from an indie filmmaker who’s working on a spoofy genre script. He wants to take one of the hoariest SciFi Originals-style cliches and propel it to its most ridiculous extremes: “Hero Scientist and his estranged also-scientist Heroine wife are thrown together to stop said monster/impending mega-disaster.”

To do that, he wants to take a look at some of the most egregious examples of the cliche. How about it? what are your recommendation for sci-fi/monster flicks whose idea of characterization is “divorced yet torch-bearing”?