Death by Dialogue (1988)

... aka: Evil Nightmare

Directed by:
Thomas Dewier

This was another of those ultra-low-budget City Lights DTV releases that served primarily as shelf filler in the late 80 and were a warm-up to Joseph Merhi and Richard Pepin's more lucrative later venture, PM Entertainment Group. Most of these were cheap-o urban action flicks, but they also put out a number of horror films like Dance of Die (1987), THE NEWLYDEADS (1987), HOLLOW GATE (1988), Epitaph (1988) and this one. Troma later acquired the entire City Lights catalogue and issued DVDs, but regardless of where you get it or the format you get it on, it's worth noting that all versions of this shot-on-video effort look (and sound) like absolute crap. I suppose in a way that's fitting because the film itself is inept in every way possible, but the murky and sometimes even blurry picture quality combined with incompetent audio recording rendering much of the dialogue completely inaudible make this a chore to sit through. While I like cheap / bad movies as much as the next guy, I didn't find this one to be much fun at all despite a couple of memorably off-the-wall moments. Actually, I was mostly just bored.

Cary (Lenny Delducca) decides to pay his crippled taxidermist uncle (Theodore Lehmann) a visit at his remote county house. Also coming along are his girlfriend Shelly (Kelly Sullivan), his leather-jacket-wearing meat head friend Gene (Jude Gerard) and Gene's hottie girlfriend Linda (Laura Albert), who speaks so softly you can barely even hear her but at least takes her top off twice when things start getting boring. Rounding out the group is Lenny, who's played by Ken Sagoes, the only real "name" in the cast because he was in a few of the Elm Street sequels around this same time. Because Sagoes is black, he's of course the token fifth wheel of the group and the scriptwriter has poorly tried to emulate his Kincaid persona by making sure he's loud, frantic and curses a lot. The uncle lives with a sinister-acting female companion (Judy Gordon) who's obviously up to something and a handyman. The latter gets torched in the opening scene by a shrouded woman brandishing a flamethrower and his rotting corpse turns up just minutes after the "teens" arrive yet isn't enough of a red flag to alter their vacation plans any.

Once the corpse is hauled off by police and the coast is clear, the teenagers decide to "get crazy" by playing volleyball, throwing a Frisbee, having a chicken fight and flying a kite. What animals! After having a deep discussion about how it would suck to be decapitated ("I don't know about you guys, but there's no way I want to die!"), Shelly finds a script called "Victim" and begins reading it. As it turns out the script has been cursed by an ancient Amazon tribe so people begin to die. While having sex in the barn, Linda gets blown through the wall but returns later on in a dream sequence where she strips off her top and then rips her boyfriends head off with a scarf (!?) after he drives up to her in a Formula One race car (?!) One of the guys stumbles onto some hair band playing in the middle of the woods (!?) and his head explodes after he's hit with a guitar. A detective is sucked underground and then pops back up covered in melted bubble gum before disappearing again. A monster, a bald demon with a sword and couple of zombies on motorcycles (!) pop in to join in on the fun. Trust me, this all sounds more entertaining than it actually is.

Can't say any of this made much sense. It's mostly just a bunch of random scenes senselessly strewn together by people who had no clue how to make a movie. The haunted script premise isn't a bad idea at all but it's mishandled and not nearly as interesting as it could have been. Near the Uncle's home is a deserted ghost town which used to be a movie set but it too is barely used. The acting, continuity, music and editing are all terrible, the dialogue (what I could make out of it at least) is even worse and the film is littered with incredibly boring scenes where characters sit around talking about nothing in particular, which makes it drag on for what feels like an eternity in between the scant horror scenes. Throw in a couple of awful 80s songs, some cut rate makeups and a few surprisingly decent stunts and that's pretty much all she wrote with this one.

★

Invisible Invaders (1959)

... aka: Assalto dallo spazio (Assault from Space)

Directed by:
Edward L. Cahn

Prolific low-budget director Edward L. Cahn seems to get no love at all these days, but he's made some pretty good low-budget genre films like the fun alien invasion comedy INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN (1957) and the highly influential IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958), which went on to be a major influence behind ALIEN (1979). Aside from extraterrestrials, he was also fond of zombies, as evidenced by films like Creature with the Atom Brain (1954), ZOMBIES OF MORA TAU (1957), Curse of the Faceless Man (1958) and THE FOUR SKULLS OF JONATHAN DRAKE (1959), which all centered around the undead. Invaders combines both the aliens and the revived corpses and it too ended up being somewhat influential by featuring the shambling dead nearly a full decade before George A. Romero rewrote the rules of such films with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). This film is however not the first of its kind and, unlike what I've seen several other reviewers state, it did not influence Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space at all. Wood's film - which also involved aliens resurrecting the dead - was shot in 1956 and had its first public screenings in 1957. Invisible was shot in late 1958 and only had its general wide release a few months before Plan 9 in 1959.

Nuclear scientist Dr. Karol Noymann (John Carradine) has been "driven beyond the line of endurance" due to long work days and dies in an accidental lab explosion. Because of the incident, his colleague and friend since childhood, Dr. Adam Penner (Philip Tonge), has given up working on "the race for atom supremacy" and become the loudest advocate for peace on the planet. That all changes when Dr. Penner is visited by the corpse of his dearly departed friend late one night. Dr. Noymann's body - not looking too worse for wear considering he died in a massive nuclear explosion! - has been inhabited by invisible aliens. The space visitors have found a way to change the molecular structure of their bodies to become invisible and have been living undetected on the moon for thousands of years. Now that the Earth is making huge scientific strides and will perfect space travel sometime soon, the moon men decide to put us in our place by staging a takeover.

Dr. Penner sends his skeptical protégé Dr. John Lamont (Robert Hutton) to warn Washington, but they scoff at their claims and both men are made laughing stocks in the papers. With the U.S. and the rest of the world unprepared, the aliens then resurrect the dead from cemeteries around the globe who then begin laying waste to entire cities by causing various catastrophes. Tall buildings and industrial complexes collapse to the ground, planes and cars crash, dams are destroyed and cities are reduced to rubble and engulfed in flames thanks to the miracle of newsreel / stock footage and recycled clips from other films that actually had a budget. Dr. Penner is put back on the "Atom Commission" and is escorted to a hidden military bunker by steel-jawed Air Force Major Bruce Jay (John Agar) somewhere in the desert where the two men, John and Penner's pretty daughter Phyllis (Jean Byron) try to come up with a way to stop the invaders. They're able to capture one of the beings using an acrylic substance that encases the body and hope to get the information they need from it to find a way to defeat the invaders.

The premise used here is utterly ridiculous and senseless, starting with the fact the aliens are invisible, not bodiless, so how on Earth are they able to get inside and control corpses? Why they even bother inhabiting the dead in the first place and why they warn humans of their impending invasion are two other plot points that make no real sense. If the aliens had just quietly done their thing as invisible beings they'd have easily been able to accomplish their goal instead of giving scientists information that is later used against them. If one can ignore the Swiss cheese story line and the droning, pointless narration, this is mildly entertaining for what it is, has some fun moments and the actors are OK. To a modern audience, however, this is mostly interesting as a precursor to what would come later on.

I probably had the most fun comparing this to Romero's later films. Though the zombies here are corpses being used simply as host bodies, the film shares numerous other similarities with Romero's Night, including 1. an attempt to portray an apocalyptic worldwide epidemic of the living dead, 2. zombies which are actually made up to look like corpses (pale skin, black eyes, wrinkly skin, bloody) and walk in a slow / stiff manner, and 3. characters holed up in one location and sitting around trying to get information from TV broadcasts. In addition, the film also seems to have influenced Romero's third 'Dead' film DAY OF THE DEAD (1985). Both Day and Invisible feature a small team of bickering scientists and army men confined to claustrophobic military bunkers where tensions rise as they attempt to find a way to destroy the dead.

This was the first credit for special effects man Roger George, who'd go on to do fx for many other horror and science fiction films into the late 80s. The assistant director was Herbert S. Greene, who went on to make THE COSMIC MAN (1959), which involved an invisible alien too and featured Carradine and several other cast members also seen here (Paul Langton and Hal Torey). Invaders was first released to theaters on a double-bill with Cahn's Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake by United Artists. In 2003, MGM released it on DVD as part of their “Midnite Movies” collection and paired it up with JOURNEY TO THE SEVENTH PLANET (1961), a Danish-American evil-alien-brain-on-Uranus movie that also starred Agar.

★★