Frankenstein's Daughter (1958)

... aka: She Monster of the Night

Directed by:
Richard E. Cuhna

Under contract for four pictures with Astor Pictures Corporation, Hawaii-born director Cunha (who was more prolific as a cinematographer for TV westerns) cranked out four low-budget 'B' horror and sci-fi films in 1958. Giant from the Unknown, Missile to the Moon, She Demons and this one were all shot in less than a week apiece on budgets of about 65,000 dollars the same year. Needless to say, these meager-budgeted, rushed productions didn't impress many viewers, though several have gone to minor cult fame. Elderly scientist Carter Morton (Felix Locher) is on the threshold of creating a drug that will "wipe out all destructive cells and organisms that plague man" in his home-based lab. Though he may be a genius, he's not a very good judge of character and has surrounded himself with evil (and pervy!) assistants. The first is Oliver Frank (Donald Murphy), the guy who helps him in the lab. Oliver is grumpy, negative and sneaky, but since it took weeks to train him, Professor Morton keeps him around. Little does anyone know, but Oliver has shortened his last name. It's actually (*gulp*) Frankenstein, and he's the grandson of you-know-who and does just what one may suspect behind his employers back. He's assisted in his work by the home's weird-o handyman Elsu (Wolfe Barzell), who had worked for the original Dr. Frankenstein. Oliver sends Elsu out to crime or accident scenes to swipe spare body parts so he can construct "the perfect being." Neither of the guys can seem to keep their paws off of Carter's pretty young niece Trudy (Sandra Knight), who's had to move in following the death of her parents.

Poor Trudy just wants to live a normal life, but we're afraid that's not possible since Oliver's been using her as a guinea pig. By giving her a tainted fruit punch cocktail, he's able to transform her into a blue-faced, wrinkly creature who roams the streets at night. After her little midnight terror strolls, Trudy awakens in bed the next morning thinking it was all just a horrible nightmare. She tries to confide this to her baby-faced boyfriend Johnny (John Ashley), but he just acts like a jerk and doesn't believe her, and her friend Suzie (Sally Todd), who spotted the creature herself, gets jealous thinking Trudy just wants to steal her attention. Since she also believes Trudy stole Johnny away from her, Suzie tries to get revenge by seducing Oliver. He takes her to Lover's Lane and starts being overly aggressive, so she demands he take her home. Still needing a brain / head for his monster creation, Oliver decides to mow her over with his car instead. He takes her head back to the lab, sews it on to the body and does the standard electricity routine to it. While he's out of the lab tending to Carter (who has a weak heart), the monster climbs off the operating table and escapes out the door.

The hulking she-monster, played by male Harry Wilson with a bandaged head, goes to a storehouse and crushes a worker with a door. It then wanders back to the lab and is tied up by Oliver and Elsu in the attic, while Elsu plots to give Carter a fatal heart attack so he can have full access to the lab. In an attempt to perk herself up, Trudy decides to host a pool party where the Paul Cavanaugh Trio perform a God awful song called "Special Date." Harold Lloyd Jr., who plays Suzie's boyfriend Don, also performs a song and dance routine at the party to "Daddy Bird." While all that's going on, policemen Boyle (John Zaremba) and Dillon (Robert Dix) show up at the home to investigate matters. Oliver rats out Carter (who's been breaking into a pharmaceutical company to steal chemicals) and has him hauled off to jail. Carter dies of a heart attack in the hospital later, and the mad Oliver uses this opportunity to let the cat out of the bag and introduce Trudy to his monster creation. It's nothing a little acid and a Bunsen burner can't take of.

Despite a busy plot, the novelty of having two she-creatures in one film and an amusingly over-the-top performance from Murphy, this still manages to be mostly dull. The cast is what provides the primary interest for cult film buffs. Ashley would go to become a Beach Party teen heartthrob and then starred in a slew of shot-in-the-Philippines exploitation films in the late 60s and early 70s before becoming a TV producer. Knight, who'd later marry Jack Nicholson, and Todd (an early Playboy Playmate) both appeared in numerous Roger Corman productions. Dix became an Al Adamson regular. Perhaps most interesting of all is Lloyd. The son of famous silent film comedian Harold Lloyd and actress Mildred Davis, Harold Jr. had a very spotty career as an actor and cabaret singer in the 50s and 60s. He received only one starring vehicle - 1953's The Flaming Star, which was unsuccessful, and ended up primarily in low-grade 'B' pictures like this one. Because he couldn't quite live up to his father's success despite numerous opportunities and was gay (with a penchant for violent lovers), Lloyd Jr. became an alcoholic, suffered from severe depression, had a stroke at age 34 and died at age 40, just a few months after his more-famous father.

An easy-to-find public domain title, this can be viewed for free online on various sites or you can pick it up for next to nothing on various budget labels. It's listed in the Razzie Movie Guide as one of the 100 Most Amusingly Bad Movies Ever Made.

★1/2

Amazing Transparent Man, The (1960)

... aka: Search for a Shadow

Directed by:
Edgar G. Ulmer

Somewhere in Texas, Laura Madison (Marguerite Chapman) helps bust violent-tempered burglar Joey Faust (Douglas Kennedy) out of prison. Oddly enough, she happens to be a complete stranger and he has no idea why she's done this or what she wants with him. After evading the police, the two go to a house out in the middle of nowhere, where the mean, bitter and distrustful Faust is introduced to Major Paul Krenner (James Griffith), an evil spy whose military career was cut short thanks to a piece of shrapnel. The Major happens to know a lot about Joey, including the fact it was his wife who squealed on him and that he's never even had a chance to meet his own daughter. He also knows that Faust has a reputation in the criminal underworld as a genius when it comes to cracking safes and vaults. Krenner would like to put Faust's skills to use stealing raw materials from government research facilities for some vague experiments being conducted there by Dr. Peter Ulof (Ivan Thiesault); a former Nazi concentration camp scientist. Dr. Ulof has created an invisibility ray which "neutralizes all tissue and bone structure in the body" and "utilizes x-ray alpha, beta and omega rays and ultra violets" and they plot to use that technology to get Faust in and out of heavily-guarded buildings. What could possibly go wrong there?

After Dr. Ulof demonstrates his ray on a guinea pig; making it invisible and then restoring its visibility, to show how safe it is, Faust is convinced. Not that he has much of a choice anyway. He either cooperates or he's turned back over to the authorities. Pretty much everyone working under the major is only doing so because he's blackmailing them. He's keeping Dr. Ulof's daughter Maria (Cormel Daniel) prisoner in the home and threatens to kill her if he doesn't cooperate. The Major's rifle-toting thug Julian (Boyd 'Red' Morgan) is only loyal because he claims to know the whereabouts of his missing son. Laura is his lover, but he keeps her in check by slapping her around. And now he has Faust, but he's not planning on taking orders from anyone. Once he's turned invisible, he steals a metal canister of nuclear material from a vault, but then he decides he wants lots of money, so he has Laura drive him to a bank so he can steal a bag of cash. The whole arrangement seems too good to be true, and that's because it is. Because Ulof has been using radioactive materials in his experiments, both he and Faust have come down with lethal radioactive poisoning and their days are numbered.

This low key crime drama with horror and sci-fi touches was one of the final films for the fairly prolific Ulmer, who has a handful of gems under his belt, including the Boris Karloff / Bela Lugosi Gothic horror classic The Black Cat (1934) and the superb low-budget film noir Detour (1945). He also contributed the worthwhile Bluebeard (1944), starring John Carradine as a murderous artist, The Man from Planet X (1951), a silly though ahead-of-its-time alien invasion tale, Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957) and others to our beloved genre. In its own small, unoriginal, zero budget way, Transparent Man shows the hallmarks of an experienced director who knows what he's doing. Filmed for peanuts, it's efficiently made, very quickly paced and doesn't really waste any time on unnecessary filler like similar films. As a result, this whole thing is compressed into a tidy 57 minutes. The performances are also pretty competent, though there's not much here that can't be seen elsewhere (primarily in Universal's Invisible Man series). But hey, if you've got an hour to kill, this can do just that pretty painlessly... you just won't be remembering it about a week later. It received the Mystery Science Theater treatment in 1995.

Filmed in 1959 under the title Search for a Shadow, Ulmer shot this back-to-back with Beyond the Time Barrier (1960) around Dallas over a 2 week period. It was one of the first efforts for Roger George, who'd keep busy for the next 30 years doing special effects for such wide-ranging films as The Dunwich Horror (1970), Blacula (1970), Humanoids from the Deep (1980), The Howling (1981), The Terminator (1984), Night of the Demons (1988) and many more. He also did invisibility fx for Invisible Invaders (1959), The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966), Invisible Strangler (1976) and others.  Photographic effects are by Howard A. Anderson. Legendary Universal make-up artist Jack B. Pierce gets a credit, though I can't really recall any make-up effects work in this one.

★★1/2

Gamera tai daiakuju Giron (1969)

... aka: Attack of the Monsters
... aka: Gamera vs. Guillon
... aka: Gamera vs. Guiron
... aka: Gamera vs. the Devil-Beast Guiron
... aka: Gamera vs. the Giant Evil Beast Guiron

Directed by:
Noriaki Yuasa

By this point in the Gamera series, things were decidedly being geared more toward children, which is cool, I guess. Kids need monster movies just like the rest of us and these films are good, harmless (well, mostly...) ways to introduce the young ones to the genre. This past holiday weekend I had the pleasure of babysitting my  3 1/2 year old niece, who kept me so busy from 7am until 9pm that I barely had a chance to squeeze in any horror movies. I did however have plenty of time to shop for Minnie Mouse socks, brush up on my watercolor painting, play Dora the Explorer games on the Nick Jr. website and listen to the Yo Gabba Gabba Megamix about 100 times. Side note: I'm praying I can get "Go! Go! Go, Foofa!" out of my head by the end of the week. My niece is usually a pretty good sleeper, but one evening she wandered into the living room while I was watching this. Since it was nearing the end and had been rather G-rated up until that point, I let her watch a couple of scenes before it was back to bed. Her verdict? Gamera is "... a silly and weird turtle." As for Guiron, well: "I don't like him. He's scary and looks mean." If only I could nail a film down in so many words.

After astronomer Dr. Shiga (Eiji Funakoshi) holds a press conference about strange magnetic waves they've been receiving, a spaceship lands in a vacant field somewhere in Japan. Young Akio (Nobuhiro Kajima), his kid sister Tomoko (Miyuki Akiyama) and his friend Tom (Chrystopher Murphy) happen to be stargazing with a telescope and see it. None of the adults - including Akio and Tomoko's mother Kuniko (Yuko Hamada) nor neighborhood cop Officer Kondo (Kon Omura) believe them, so the next morning the three kids ride their bikes go to the spot where it landed and sure enough there it is. Akio and Tom go inside and realize no one's on board, so they immediately start pushing buttons. Next thing they know the ship's lifting off and they're flying through space. When they come across some meteors, Gamera the giant jet-propelled flying turtle and "friend of children" saves the day by smashing the rocks, but the spaceship speeds up and they lose him.

Meanwhile, Akio and Tom have crash landed on a strange planet called Terra, which is on the opposite side of the sun and has an atmosphere somewhat similar to ours. They first spot the big, winged, aluminum-foil-wrapped bird that looks similar to Gaos, who'd caused some problems in a previous film in this series. Gaos encounters Guiron, who comes crawling out of the ground. Looking like a cross between a shark and a Bowie knife and equipped with throwing stars on his schnoz, Guiron reflects Goas' laser ray back onto him, which cuts off his leg. The two boys then encounter a pair of female aliens in tights, but are Barbella (Hiroki Kai) and Florbella (Reiko Kasahara) as kind as they first appear? Conducting experiments in controlling the environment have backfired for the race of Terrans and now because their planet is frozen and overrun by monsters, they'd like to locate. The two aliens are the last of their race, have lots of neat gadgets and have control over Guiron; who does their bidding. They'd also plan on eating Akio and Tom's brains to acquire their knowledge. A trip to Earth for them will be just another all-you-can eat cannibal buffet.

Back on Earth, little Tomoko tries to tell mom what happened, but her constant whining falls on deaf ears. Tom's skeptical mother Elza (Edith Hanson) shows up looking for her son and also doesn't believe Tomoko; telling authorities "Psychologists insist that if you believe everything a child says it's educationally and psychologically wrong!" So let me get this straight... In a world where gigantic alien creatures demolishing cities is the norm, and a big, child-loving turtle with a build in jet propulsion system flies around fighting them, is it really all that hard to believe that a couple of kids flew off in a spaceship? Nevertheless, this is cute and lively if you can get past Akio's obnoxious habit of calling everyone an idiot. Gamera not only gets to fight Guiron several times and eventually save the day, but he also gets to demonstrate his formidable gymnastic abilities on the uneven bar. Some scenes seem a little harsh for really small children, like when the aliens give the boys doughnuts laced with "sleeping powder," then strap Akio down, shave his noggin and then begin to cut into his head with an electric saw!

Yuasa also directed the original Gamera, the Giant Monster (1965) and all of the sequels in the original series aside from the first: Gamera vs. Barugon (1966; aka War of the Monsters); which is more serious and adult-oriented. The others are Gamera vs. Gaos (1967; aka Return of the Giant Monsters) and Gamera vs. Viras (1968; aka Destroy All Planets), scenes from both of which are used as flashback footage here, Gamera vs. Monster X (1970) and Gamera vs. Zigra (1971). AIP-TV initially released the films in America, while Sandy Frank handled later U.S. theatrical distribution for most of the series (often having the films re-dubbed a second time). They're all pretty easy to find on DVD, VHS or online to view.

★★1/2