The B-Masters Cabal

It’s a shame none of the following films starred Liz Taylor, but still

SUPERFIGHTS After Jack has a B-movie flashback to show the audience his inner turmoil, he’s ordered to meet the other fighters at a warehouse. It turns out that Sawyer is on to Budokai and puts him in an illegal caged death match with The Beast. Jack is determined to help, and with Angel’s reluctant assistance he manages to save Budokai. Jack’s number looks to be up when he faces The Beast, but he flashes his cheap pendant and Beast Remembers His Humanity. The enraged Sawyer kills The Beast and has Sally and Mrs. Cody kidnapped.

THE STRANGER The Stranger paints a skintight black outfit onto Kathy Long as The Stranger and sends her to a tiny town in the middle of the American southwest. Like every tiny town in the middle of the American southwest that ever appeared in a B-movie, this one is lorded over by a group of bikers who ride in, Mongol Horde like, every now and again to demand tribute and drink a lot of beer. The Stranger apparently has some sort of problem with the bikers, which she expresses early in the film by breaking out some poorly choreographed martial arts fury and breaking their necks.

Elizabeth Taylor was forty-one years old when she made Ash Wednesday, an age when actresses in Hollywood start to find it difficult to be cast in major Hollywood studio movies. So no doubt Taylor was starting to feel the pressure of appearing at her very best, both in looks and with her acting ability. One might wonder before watching this movie if Taylor was able to perform at her best with these pressures, as well as wonder if Taylor was able to appear as the beautiful woman the other characters in the movie feel her character is. After watching the movie, I can tell you with full confidence that whatever faults the movie might have, none of them have to do with Taylor. Taylor still had it – pity so much of the rest of the movie falls short of being satisfying.

TARKAN VS. THE VIKINGS

Tarkan is a string bean with a moustache, the Vikings wear pastel bath rugs instead of furs, and there is even a real, live inflatable octopus. This movie is almost 100% pure kitsch.

Review Snippet:
Speaking of appearances and things not looking like they are supposed to look, let’s discuss the hero. Based upon the cover art, Tarkan is the twin brother of Conan the Barbarian as described by Robert E. Howard and painted by Frank Frazetta. The man playing Tarkan in the movie looks nothing like that. He looks like a pink lobster wearing a silly moustache (and a bath mat). He also wears pearl eye makeup. Granted, the pearl color is an improvement over the light blue he wears in the original “Tarkan” (1969), but it still does not look particularly fearsome.

Lesson Learned:
The dog is mightier than the sword.

TARKAN VS. THE VIKINGS

Tarkan is a string bean with a moustache, the Vikings wear pastel bath rugs instead of furs, and there is even a real, live inflatable octopus. This movie is almost 100% pure kitsch.

Review Snippet:
Speaking of appearances and things not looking like they are supposed to look, let’s discuss the hero. Based upon the cover art, Tarkan is the twin brother of Conan the Barbarian as described by Robert E. Howard and painted by Frank Frazetta. The man playing Tarkan in the movie looks nothing like that. He looks like a pink lobster wearing a silly moustache (and a bath mat). He also wears pearl eye makeup. Granted, the pearl color is an improvement over the light blue he wears in the original “Tarkan” (1969), but it still does not look particularly fearsome.

Lesson Learned:
The dog is mightier than the sword.

(Actual quote.)

Poland’s Wilczyca (The She-Wolf, 1983) is a solid werewolf film from a country not known for its horror cinema. One of a very few movies to portray a werewolf as a real wolf, rather than an actor in furry makeup, Wilczyca succeeds best the further it gets from its main story thread. But by mishandling the relationship between its main characters, Wilczyca falls maddeningly short of being the classic it ought to have been.

(And then there’s the dog. But let’s not go into that…)

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JET STORM (1959)

In which we find out that the British do disaster movies…just a little differently.

Richard Attenborough heads an ensemble cast as Ernest Tilley, a man literally maddened by grief when his young daughter is killed by a hit-and-run driver. After a two-year search, Ernest finally tracks down and corners the man responsible, meaning to take a full revenge on him. And if that requires blowing up a plane and killing not only the guilty party but himself, his own wife, and everybody else on board, well, so be it.

Fortunately, however, the plane is under the command of Stanley Baker; and if a man is capable of taking on the entire Zulu nation, he should certainly be up to the task of dealing with a deranged Dickie Attenborough – right?

Maybe…

So what do you do if you want to rip off The Most Dangerous Game, but you are limited with your funds and other resources? Simply do what the makers of Confessions Of A Psycho Cat did – make the movie so goofy that the audience will sit through the slow and badly made parts of the movie in order to see what craziness you’ll soon pull out next.

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Just some housekeeping, folks, while I battle a killer work deadline and an even more killer dose of the flu…

I have revised, reformatted and added screenshots to AMPHIBIAN MAN (1962) – damn; it’s been ages since I watched this, and I’d almost forgotten how good it is! – and reformatted and added screenshots to MONSTER FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR (1954), which…isn’t quite as good, but does have its moments.

Sort of. Kind of. If you tilt your head and squint…

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Some non-Hammer stuff, too, but yeah.  Mainly Hammer:

The Cyclops (1956), in which a rescue party finds the guy they were looking for, but he’s in no condition to be brought home…

Five Million Years to Earth (1967), in which there are fossil ape-men, a buried spaceship, paleolithic ghosts, trans-temporal possession, grasshoppers from Mars, and a huge psionic outer-space bug-devil, but those jackasses from the Ministry of Defense don’t believe in any of it…

The Old Dark House (1963), in which a teamup no one ever thought to ask for yields results nobody would want…

Paranoiac (1962), in which any one-line synopsis I might devise would just be rendered obsolete within fifteen minutes anyway…

The Phantom Carriage (1921), in which dying at midnight on New Year’s Eve is almost as bad an idea as fixing the world’s agriest drifter’s overcoat…

[REC] (2007), in which those TV people did say they were hoping for something exciting to happen…

The Reptile (1966), in which were-snakes and their fathers make crappy next-door neighbors…

and…

The Stranglers of Bombay (1959), in which “Thug Life” has an altogether different meaning.