The gorilla suit.

The diving helmet.

The legend.

ROBOT MONSTER (1953)

The monster suits will be along next time… and I think you’ll be very pleased with them when they arrive.  But for now:

Dead Man’s Eyes (1944), in which Edward Fielding has it brought forcefully to his attention that making someone a bequest of your body-parts is a terrible idea…

The Ghost Train (1941), in which not even screenwriter Val Guest thinks the star comedian is funny…

Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952), in which Arthur Lucan further underscores the dreadfulness of Arthur Askey by being less unfunny than him despite appearing in the teeth-clenchingly awful swan-song of the world’s worst drag act…

On the Beach (1959), which is actually good if you can get beyond all the goddamned “Waltzing Matilda”…

and…

The Return of Dracula (1958), in which Paul Landers and Pat Fielder do Salem’s Lot twenty years before Stephen King.

Continuing to fill up the Rubber Soul Roundtable…

THE MAZE
There are a lot of times when I don’t remember a movie (sometimes mere hours after watching it), but I remember a particular scene or vague theme from the movie. All I could remember about Treasure of the Four Crowns was the scene where fireballs on ridiculously visible wires were flying around. With Sword and the Sorcerer, it was “guy falls into room of naked women” and “guy makes witch’s chest explode, then catches her heart.” Although there are many times when I remembered both the scene and the title of the movie, there are many other times when I have no recollection at all of the film’s title. It is in these instances that the Internet has proven to finally be worth all the trouble. Thousands and thousands of years of social and technological evolution finally lead to the moment when I can look up “screaming banshee on moors” and find out in which movie it appears. And the internet was there for me again, very recently, when I was trying to remember the title of a movie about which all I could recall was, “frog man in center of hedge maze.”

It’s time for the latest Video Binge over at Cold Fusion, which is an entire month of first sequels to movies I’ve previously reviewed. Can’t you just feel the electricity in the air?

First up is 666: The Beast (2007), which is a sequel to a knockoff of a remake of a knockoff. Which pretty much tells you how good it is.

And then there’s Femalien 2 (1998), which has exactly the same things going for it as the original Femalien. Wink wink, nudge nudge, yawn yawn.

It’s time for another chapter of That Was Then, This Is Now, in which Chad Denton of The Good, The Bad, The Ugly and I take a look at Marie Belloc Lowndes’ novel, The Lodger, and some of the films adapted from it.

Warning: All three reviews plus the discussion that follows contain explicit spoilers of the novel and the films. Proceed at your own risk!

The Lodger (1927) at And You Call Yourself A Scientist!

The Lodger (1932) at And You Call Yourself A Scientist!

The Lodger (1944) at The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

The discussion….with special guest literary critic!

Todd chimes in with the first of Teleport City’s contributions to the Rubber Soul roundtable:

HANUMAN AND THE SEVEN ULTRAMEN
When I’m writing about a movie, I’m much less interested in telling you how good or bad it is than I am in justifying the time I spent watching it. As such, I’m looking for those points of interest–either contained in the film itself or in the circumstances of its production–that will make the whole endeavor seem worthwhile. Providing a break from the rigors of that approach are those occasions on which I encounter films whose WTF quotient is so high that they exist on a plane beyond simple judgments of good or bad–the mystery of whose very existence overshadows any questions of quality. Hanuman and the 7 Ultramen is such a film. And like another fine example of the species, the Turkish superhero mash-up 3 Dev Adam, Hanuman achieves that rarified WTF air by means of positioning some very familiar elements within a very foreign context. It’s just hard to dismiss a shockingly gory movie that teams the world’s most beloved giant Japanese superhero with the Hindu monkey god for not measuring up to some notional standard of “coherence” or “watchability”.

May is another B-Masters’ Roundtable month! Drop in over the next 31 days – particularly on the 31st day – as this time around we pay tribute to some of the most important people in B-Movies. Directors, writers, stars— Bah! Where would any of us be without – the guy in the suit !?

It’s RUBBER SOUL: all this month at the B-Masters’ Blog.