The B-Masters Cabal

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”?

Looks like I come in third for posting to the new blog. Oh well, it’s a podium finish.

Kilink Istanbul’da
Created in 1966 by Pietro Granelli, Killing was a reprehensible brute on his best days, and most of the time the things he did were extreme even by the standards raised (or lowered) by Kriminal. That Killing relied on the photonovel format — using live-action still photography of actual staged scenes rather than artwork — made the salacious nature of his sexploitative, hyper-violent adventures even more risque. Needless to say, with Killing boasting no redeeming values whatsoever, people once again lapped it up just as eagerly as critics, censorship boards, and parents despised it. Killing was a one-man 80s metal band music video, all wearin’ a skeleton suit and causing the town censor to scream, wag his finger, turn red, and finally go into cardiac arrest as the head of the PTA angrily bangs a gavel and the mousy town librarian has her top blown off by a wicked guitar riff, causing her to jump up on top of the card catalog (it was the 80s, after all) and do a sexy pole dance striptease as, all the while, this gun-toting madman in a skull mask lords over it, laughing evilly as he stands on top of an overpass with arms akimbo.

My fresh review of Forbidden Zone: Alien Abduction (1996) is really a replacement for the review I originally wrote something like eight years ago.  In the intervening years, I’ve become far more insightful and entertaining, and I’ve deleted the earlier version so that you can’t prove me wrong.

To ME falls the honour of the very first real post at the brand new B-Masters’ Blog! And that post is to announce an update at And You Call Yourself A Scientist!, where you will now find a review of—

Jason X (2002)

I believe that’s what’s known as “an anticlimax”. Sorry! Hopefully Keith Allison will do better by everybody.