Rymdinvasion i Lappland (1959)

... aka: Horror in the Midnight Sun
... aka: Invasion of the Animal People
... aka: Space Invasion from Lapland
... aka: Space Invasion of Lapland
... aka: Terror in the Midnight Sun

Directed by:
Virgil W. Vogel
Jerry Warren (1962 U.S. release)

Director Vogel began his film career as an editor in 1951. By the middle of the same decade he'd make his directorial debut with the somewhat fun THE MOLE PEOPLE (1956) and then became an in-demand TV director who worked on hundreds of television shows until his death in 1996. Here and there, he'd work on a low-budget movie. This is one of those, and it was made the same year he helped edit Orson Welles' masterpiece Touch of Evil (1958). As far as I can tell, Rymdinvasion i Lappland ("Space Invasion of Lapland"), a Swedish / US co-production filmed in English, received two different releases here in America after a 1959 release in Sweden. The first and (unfortunately) most common of these versions, which was a fixture on TV for years, was the one titled Invasion of the Animal People. Released in 1962, that version was victim of a Jerry Warren raping. He had it re-edited, cut out footage and then added new, cheap, talky scenes starring the original film's star, Barbara Wilson, plus new cast members George Mitchell, Katherine Victor and Fred Hoffman. Name value star John Carradine was then drafted to narrate the entire mess. This version also played in theaters on a double bill with Warren's Terror of the Bloodhunters (1962). An un-tampered with version titled either Horror in the Midnight Sun or Terror in the Midnight Sun later showed up. The Something Weird DVD contains both versions for easy comparison. The original cut before Warren got his grubby mitts on it is clearly the one to go with.

A large, round, glowing meteor-like object slides across the ground and crashes into a mountainside in the Midnight Sun Territory in Lappland above the Arctic Circle in Northern Sweden. Because natives reported that the unidentified object moved across the horizon for miles before finally deciding to fall, authorities begin to suspect that it wasn't really a meteor as reported, but some kind of spacecraft. American scientist Dr. Frederick Wilson (Robert Burton) shows up in Sweden to lead the investigation. He goes to the Royal Academy of Science, where Dr. Walter Ullman (Gösta Prüzelius) hooks him up with young playboy geologist Erik Engstrom (Sten Gester). Upon arriving in Lappland, Dr. Wilson and Erik meet up with military man Colonel Robert Bottiger (Bengt Blomgren), another scientist named Dr. Henrik (Åke Grönberg) and the rest of their expedition and they're off to survey the site by helicopter. Finding the still-smoldering object lodged in the snow, they decide to return the following day. Before that can happen, a bunch of slaughtered reindeer and giant footprints belonging to something "at least 20 feet tall" are found...  Is there a correlation between the fallen "meteor," the dead deer and the footprints?

The men, plus Dr. Wilson's rebellious (and pretty annoying) Olympic figure skating / skiing star niece Diane (Wilson), who sneaks on board the helicopter, head out to the site. There, they discover what the meteor truly is (a spherical ship), but something really tall and powerful shows up destroy both their helicopter and their pilot. Stranded miles from anywhere, Diane and Erik - the best skiers in the group - head out toward the nearest village for help. While the other men wait, one falls prey to something else lurking inside the spacecraft. Diane injures her knee hitting a tree, but luckily she and Erik find a safety cabin, which turns out to not be so safe when a very tall, hairy monster shows up and causes an avalanche. It grabs Diane and takes her back to the ship where she also encounters a trio of cone-head aliens dressed in black, hooded robes. After the creature destroys a village, our heroes and the natives head out after it for the cliff-top finale.

Far more enjoyable than usually given credit for, this hearkens back to several classic American monster movies of the past; most notably King Kong (a big hairy monster having an affinity for the pretty leading lady) and Frankenstein (the torch-carrying mob [though amusingly on skis] heading out after the creature). The sense of place and the desolate, snowy environment - vividly captured by very good on-location filming and nice aerial photography by Hilding Bladh - also helps to distinguish it. And like any good monster movie, naturally this needs a good monster to succeed. Thankfully, this film has one. The big, shaggy-haired, man-in-a-suit, Yeti-like creature has a flat pig-like snout and protruding tusks, is pretty expressive and charming, and gets several small scale sets to tear through at the end. It's saved for the last 20 minutes of this 71 minute film, but it's worth the wait and gets a lot of scenes once it finally does show up. Odert von Schoultz did an above average job on the special effects for the time.

There's also a lot of well-photographed skiing footage (even sometimes utilizing skier POV camerawork), a musical number and even an amusing theme song ("Midnight Sun Lament"). Fans of 50s monster movies should definitely check this one out. In 1960, starlet Wilson sued the producers for 150,000 dollars for utilizing a body double to film a nude scene (seen from behind a sheer curtain) without informing her. Some prints have this brief scene, while others do not.

★★1/2

Teenage Zombies (1959)

... aka: Teenage Torture

Directed by:
Jerry Warren

"Young pawns thrust into pulsating cages of horror in a sadistic experiment!" If only this were half as exciting. Filmed in 1957 but not released until two years later to capitalize on the "teen" horror craze of the day, this early Jerry Warren effort (comprised entirely of his own footage for a change) is going to be an endurance test for most sober viewers. Four teeny boppers; Reggie (Don Sullivan) and his girl Julie (Mitzie Albertson), and Skip (Paul Pepper) and his girl Pam (Brianne Murphy), decide to head out on their boat for some water skiing and instead end up stumbling upon small, supposedly uninhabited "Mullet Island" (!), which is located about "30 to 40 miles" off shore. They go inland and immediately see a procession of slow-moving men walking down a path. Skip notes, "They look doped... or dead... or something." And he is partially correct. They are indeed drugged, but I'm not so sure about the dead part. The four try to run off but when they get back to their boat, it's gone. The guys separate from the girls and all four eventually find themselves at the island's only residence... and locked inside of a cage.

Reggie wonders "What kind of a creep joint is this?" and his captor; unscrupulous scientist Dr. Myra (Katherine Victor), will explain. She's in the middle of doing a top secret experiment there and, the more extra test subjects she has, the better. Myra is working on behalf of some unnamed foreign country and her chief objective is to come up with a formula that will turn Americans into mindless zombies. Once she's completed her task, her countrymen will either drop the capsules from the sky or sneak it into the water supply, and turn all United States citizens into their slaves. Myra's helper is Ivan (an unbilled Chuck Niles), a mute hunchback who's already been converted with her formula. She also has a gorilla to experiment on, but is ready to complete "Stage 3" by going ahead with her experiments on her new test subjects. A couple of guys from her country show up to make sure things go according to plan and tell Myra that if she doesn't hurry it along they'll be forced to just drop a hydrogen bomb instead. Meanwhile, Morrie (Jay Hawk) and Dottie (Nan Green), friends of the missing kids, start snooping around and go to the cops looking for help. They eventually convince the local sheriff to come along with them to the island, but he turns out to be in cahoots with the bad guys and has been sending them drunks and prisoners all this time for their experiments. Can the kids get the upper hand on those evil foreigners?

To some, Teenage Zombies is a fun and hilariously bad movie. To most, it's absolute torture to sit through. Either way, it's cheap, poorly filmed, endlessly talky, slow-moving, technically inept, bargain basement garbage. The acting and dialogue are both terrible, nearly the entire thing is comprised of medium shots which seem to go on forever and the movie is most certainly not going to deliver what anyone is going to want out of it. The gorilla prominently displayed on the poster is only featured in two brief scenes, is difficult to see and doesn't even really interact with the rest of the cast. And if you're expecting teenage zombies, don't hold your breath. Two of the teen characters are indeed transformed into mindless "zombies," but all they do is stand in place for a few minutes until the antidote is found. Said antidote is pretty much just anonymously plucked off the shelf when the time comes. What luck! The other "zombie" test subjects on the island are only seen in one shot and from afar.

The biggest laughs don't come until the very end during some of the most horribly choreographed and least exciting 'action' scenes you will ever seen. Warren movie regular Victor is especially impressive in her refusal to participate in any of this nonsense and just sits around looking bored and annoyed even when one of the teen tootsies tries to engage in a cat fight with her. The character also dresses rather glamorously (just throwing her lab coat on over her luxurious gowns) for someone living alone on an island working in a lab most of the time.

Warren took credit for producing and directing, but used the alias "Jacques Lecotier" for his screenplay for some strange reason. As if one is worse than another! Lead actor Sullivan went on to appear in THE GIANT GILA MONSTER and THE MONSTER OF PIEDRAS BLANCAS, which were both released the same year. The only other notable cast member is Brianne Murphy. Murphy was married to Warren at the time, was also the production coordinator and wardrobe supervisor of Zombies, went on to direct BLOOD SABBATH (1972) and became an Emmy-winning cinematographer. In 1980, she made history by becoming the very first female to shoot a major studio, union picture (FATSO) and was also the first female member of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC). Several of the other actors later cropped up in Warren's TERROR OF THE BLOODHUNTERS (1962) and FACE OF THE SCREAMING WEREWOLF (1964).

A public domain title, this is an easy one to find and watch many places online for free if you're interested. Don't be.

★

Cape Canaveral Monsters, The (1960)

Directed by:
Phil Tucker

Phil Tucker, mastermind behind the notorious stinker ROBOT MONSTER (1953), strikes again! A couple leaving the beach are possessed by a pair of alien beings (represented by tiny specks of "green" light), who cause them to wreck their car and one of them to lose a limb. The aliens - Hauron (Jason Johnson) and Nadja (Katherine Victor) - hide out in a secret cave laboratory and have several chief objectives while on Earth. For starters, Hauron needs a new arm after the car wreck and a failed attempt to just sew it on (a dog ends up ripping if off), which gives them an opportunity to experiment with limb, bone and skin transplants; using unwilling victims as their guinea pigs, of course. Second, they've been given orders to sabotage NASA and prevent any rockets from leaving the planet, which means Hauron gets to frequently blast them out of the sky with his huge (looks like a rocket launcher) photon gun. And finally, the aliens are plotting to eventually invade the Earth and take over, so they'd first like to get to know and understand humans just a little bit better. They achieve this through observation, drilling captives with questions and then sticking them in their cryogenic capsule, freezing them and sending them back to their home planet for research.

Meanwhile, NASA scientists can't seen to figure out why their rockets keep exploding soon after take-off. Student and brilliant young mathematician Tom Wright (Scott Peters) decides to try to get to the bottom of things. But first, he'd like to have coffee with cute co-worker Sally (Linda Connell), the daughter of one of his superiors, German scientist Dr. Heinrich Von Hoften (Billy Greene), who objects to the union and mixing business with pleasure. Nevertheless, the two lovebirds, along with their pals Bob (Gary Travis) and Shirley (Thelaine Williams) start sneaking off to Lover's Lane for some late night romance. Shirley and Bob get kidnapped and taken back to the cave, where Bob becomes an unwilling arm and chin donor to help repair Hauron and Shirley is injected with sedative, dressed in a metallic sheet, given the alien equivalent of electro convulsive shock therapy and is frozen alive in preparation for being shipped off to the alien's planet. It isn't long before Tom and Sally also find themselves being held against their will, as their colleagues and some police officers scour the beaches and hills trying to locate them.

It's low-budget, some of the dialogue is silly (ditto for the 'science'), there's a really bad attempt at a foreign accent and the ending is weak (I'll get to that here in a sec), but this is still a pretty fun little diversion. I particularly liked the fact that the male alien is the slightly more compassionate of the two and wants to have pleasant conversations with humans while the female alien is colder, more evil and just wants to get down to business. The movie is also jam-packed with alien gadgets. In addition to the aforementioned photon gun and the cryogenics tube, the aliens use a device with a spinning translucent plate to communicate with their planet and a radium light to pin people to the wall. They also booby trap the cave with some kind of device that suspends people in their tracks, blast the cops with a "paralysis ray" and have a vat of bubbling goo nearby that's a portal back home.

Canadian-born Scott Peters (born Peter Sikorski) had already appeared in such Z-movie classics as THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (1957), INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN (1957) and ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE (1958) when he appeared in this one. Though he's about ten years too old for the role of a young science prodigy, he's likable and amiable enough. Plus he gets the film's best line: "I think with a little help we can lick these freaks!" Johnson and Victor are pretty amusing as the stone-faced aliens. Ms. Victor (born Katena Ktenavea) was a decent actress adept at playing villainess' and fairly well-known to cult cinema fans for her appearances in MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1952), TEENAGE ZOMBIES (1957) and a half-dozen films for Jerry Warren. In her later years, she kept steadily employed with Disney, doing continuity coordinator for such animated TV shows as Tail Spin, Darkwing Duck, Quack Pack, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid and many others. Most of the other cast members' film careers began and ended right here, though there's a long-standing (and incorrect) rumor that director Al Adamson is also in it.

Now back to that ending... I suppose you might want to skip this paragraph if you don't want it spoiled. Our heroes manage to escape the cave before it explodes. The aliens on the other hand had already transformed back into light specks and returned to their planet minutes earlier. Since the alien duo had already mentioned they're planning to takeover the Earth, it felt kind of half-assed and incomplete for the leads and their rescuers to just walk off into the sunset acting carefree. Especially with the knowledge that they're going to have to face more of these alien fiends sometime in the near future. I don't mind it having an open ending per se, but I thought it would awesome if after exiting the cave our heroes looked up into the sky and it was filled with light specks. That would have been an awesome and affordable apocalyptic ending instead of just completely leaving us hanging!

I might be overrating this by some people's standards, as it's usually written off as laughable schlock of par with the director's other, more-famous sci-fi turkey. I simply don't agree at all with that assessment. It's enjoyable, entertaining and with a run time of just 69 minutes, it moves at a good pace without the need for too much filler.

★★1/2