The Flying Serpent (1946)

Written by: John T. Neville

Directed by: Sam Newfield

Starring: George Zucco, Ralph Lewis, Hope Kramer

When I picked this flick, I don't think I did more than look at the cover art before making the decision. I'd heard of the movie before, but couldn't remember much of anything I'd read, and based on the poster was expecting something along the lines of The Giant Claw. But any devoted fan of 50's giant monster flicks has heard of most all of them. As popular as they were, in a time before direct-to-video markets, a genre just couldn't get flooded like it does today and it was a lot easier to keep track of even the lowliest embiggened beasties.

Imagine my surprise when I started looking up production information and discovered the flick predated The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms by seven years. And the monster is only about the size of a large dog.

Dr. Andrew Forbes is searching for the lost treasure of the Aztecs, and along with the gold, he discovers the creature they called Quetzalcoatl. It's a sort of mangy horned lizard with the sorriest, most threadbare wings you've ever seen. He somehow manages to confine it to a cage in the treasure chamber, but makes the mistake of giving his wife one of its “beautiful” (stop laughing, they're beautiful, dammit!) feathers. The thing gets out and mauls his wife to death, leading him to discover that the creature is murderously jealous of its plumage. That's right, folks, we have here what is to my knowledge the only vanity-driven monster in cinema history.

When a two-fisted radio announcer (!?) decides he's going to solve the mystery of the vampire murders (the creature inexplicably drains its victims of blood – well, it's not that inexplicable considering PRC just cut-and-pasted some Aztec flim-flammery over the script to Devil Bat, one of their most successful cheapie horror flicks, and apparently didn't bother to remove the vampirism), he's going to have a helluva time convincing the authorities that they're really up against a mad archaeologist and his pet monster.

The acting, as with most of these old programmers, is mostly solid without being exceptional. The monster is an impressively ambitious idea for a movie this cheap, and turns out so endearingly awful it's hard not to like it. The one aspect that really stuck out for me is that the Odious Comic Relief ™ character proves to be of some use and even helps the hero fight off the monster at one point. A useful comedic character in a horror flick is a rarity even today, and almost unheard of when the Poverty Row studios ruled the genre.

I've been having some difficulty finding anything to say about this flick. The toughest part about doing these reviews (“Quit your damn bitching, no one's making you do this and no one really wants you to keep doing it!”, I hear you say) is finding a good angle to tackle each article from; to find an interesting bit of information or a good anecdote to wrap the whole thing around. Not every movie is particularly inspiring in that regard. I enjoy watching lots of movies that I don't have much to say about. But dammit, I've been putting in a ton of extra hours during planting season and just haven't had much time to pick anything else, and I've had this file sitting half finished on my computer for weeks. So if nothing else, I guess this will serve the purpose of cataloging the fact that I watched yet another movie with nothing going for it but a monster so mangy it makes the giant buzzard from Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster look as majestic as a bald eagle.

The Falling (1987)

Written by: Deran Sarafian

Directed by: Deran Sarafian

Starring: Dennis Christopher, Martin Hewitt, Lynn-Holly Johnson

Happy Halloween, motherfuckers! Well, it's not Halloween for a few weeks yet, but not only is October the best month of the year because it has the only holiday worth celebrating besides Thanksgiving (turkey, pumpkin pie, and smallpox – woo!), it's also harvest time here in the Midwest, and when I'm not doing time at my normal 50-hour-a-week job at the ethanol plant, I'm driving tractor for my dad. So chances are, this is the last communication I'll be transmitting for the month, but I wanted to make sure my handful of loyal followers had something worth following.

What's that? No, I meant Halloween! Not to mention all the spectacular seasonal beers. Columbus Day, pfft. What a crock of shit. Last year, when Phoenix was in kindergarten, Malorie had to tell me to calm down when he brought all that Columbus Day shit home from school. “It's just kindergarten,” she said. “Let it go.” Why should I let it go? Columbus was a moron who sailed out of port in the wrong fucking direction and couldn't read a goddamn map. The North American continent was “discovered” independently at least three different times before that imbecile showed up, saw some brown people, and figured his job was done. Why the hell should I let my children's “teachers” knowingly give my kids erroneous information just because the gub'mint is too lazy to admit the mistake and give up one extra holiday? I can't make deposits at my bank because some fucking Spaniard couldn't figure out which direction he was sailing in six hundred years ago and now the mailman thinks he gets to watch Days of Our Lives instead of bringing me the new Absu record which I per-ordered a month in advance? Fuck that.

What the hell was I talking about now? Oh, right. Spaniards. Well, they may not be the best sailors on the planet, but they can make a decent horror movie. Decades before making a name in television with series like CSI and House, filmmaker Deran Sarafian wrote and directed this odd flick for no less a studio than MGM, and never have I seen a major studio horror flick that looked less like what you'd expect. Basically, imagine Alien 2: Sulla Terra, but shot in Spain with an American cast and at least nominal attention paid to story logic.

The space station Skylab, set up for top-secret biological experiments based on the findings of Apollo 14, has crash landed in rural Spain. This is going to seriously fuck up the pre-college vacation of three high-school friends who have decided to rent an RV and roam across Europe for the summer. The microbes from Skylab have lain dormant for five years, but become active just in time to intersect with the activities of Damon, Michael, and Samantha, long-time friends from California. Samantha is the cute and popular friend of Damon and Michael, who have invited her on their vacation in the hopes of discovering which, if either, of them she is attracted to.

One day, after becoming fed up with the unsubtle advances of Damon, Samantha runs into town with the dune buggy, leaving the boys at the RV. She winds up kidnapped by the mysterious Dr. Tracer, who after leaving his attache Captain Wells to die in the NASA research center set up in a ruined castle, heads back to town to call his bosses and inform them that nothing short of a napalm strike is going to save all of Europe from being destroyed by the alien organism they hoped would die during re-entry when the Skylab satellite was deliberately crashed. Unfortunately it didn't die, and now the entire town of Durante is under the control of an alien microbe that can control its host organisms and is trying to block the town off from the outside world until it can reach maturity in the townsfolk and infest the countryside.

Hijinks ensue when Tracer meets our heroes, has a change of heart, and informs the trio that an antidote is possible if only one of them can retrieve one of the canisters from the NASA site. It works on the same principle as the original tetanus horse serum shots, you see. But what happens to the original horse when it's injected with tetanus? And what if tetanus were as catching as the flu? And what if instead of vomiting and other various unpleasant bodily ejections, that flu manifested itself as an aggressive alien creature? Oh, poopie, indeed.

As I said, this flick reminded me of nothing so much as Alien 2, but with logic and some production values. The human characters, rare enough in an 80's horror flick, actually serve to further invest you in the story instead of making you cheer for their deaths. Michael and Damon are two believably awkward and unsociable nerds, who share a mutual friend and crush in the cute-but-not-inaccessibly-hot Samantha, and have a good-natured competition for her affection without ruining their friendship. And Samantha, for her part, isn't a stuck-up cheerleader type, but is perfectly willing to take her relationship with Michael beyond friendship once he has the balls to admit his crush. And fighting off an alien-possessed zombie horde doesn't hurt either.

While the segments with the main characters may be tonally disparate (suggesting more a horror-comedy in the Fright Night vein) from the atmospherically creepy bits at the beginning involving just the scientists, and especially the cow being infected with the alien organism and the hungry dog being dragged into the body cavity of the dead cow by said organism, this flick succeeds on the merits of never playing anything totally for laughs. It's also exemplary in having our three main characters all be goofy and charming and totally human without ever relinquishing any of their sympathy. Even on the few occasions where the two guys are acting like douches, it's clear they're only doing it out of an attempt to show off for a girl they like based on a background of total social awkwardness and not having a clue how to act around a girl.

Horror flicks could really take some notes on how to treat their main characters' relationships from this movie, which is really strange considering the almost total lack of communication between the international crews and the fact that the production ran so far over schedule and budget that it didn't get released until fully 3 years after shooting finished and caused the producer to quit the movie business entirely.

Dead End Drive-In (1986)

Written by: Peter Carey, Peter Smalley

Directed by: Brian Trenchard-Smith

Starring: Ned Manning, Natalie McCurry, Peter Whitford

I've expressed previously my displeasure with the fact that so many of the incredibly cool-looking “Ozsploitation” flicks from the documentary Not Quite Hollywood are not readily available to us poor Yanks. All the more reason to treasure those few we can get without having to resort either to hook or crook. I'd honestly forgotten this was one of them, and nearly deleted it while trimming some fat from my Netflix queue. Luckily I looked at the information before consigning the flick to infinity, and saw it was directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith. That sounds awfully familiar... Hey, I saw one of his movies at B-Fest a few months ago! Trenchard-Smith is also the director of the exhaustingly hyperactive Stunt Rock. Well, that virtually guarantees some insane car chases and explosions, doesn't it? Let's dig in! This is possibly the strangest and most inventive post-apocalypse movie I've ever seen, and you'll see why in a minute (and if you'd rather not know why, I recommend you queue this sucker up and watch it before finishing this review - I was lucky enough to not know a single thing about it when I watched it and that's the best way to enjoy it).

We open with our hero, the exercise-obsessed Jimmy “Crabs” (“I thought I had 'em once, but I didn't!”), having his evening jog through the ruined wasteland of a city he calls home interrupted by a group of “Carboys”, the roving gangs of automotive scavengers who make up the great majority of youth culture in a society where manufacturing has been rendered all but obsolete by economic collapse. Luckily they get scared off, and he manages to secure a date with his squeeze Carmen before heading home, where we see why he's so concerned with jogging and working out. His brother, Frank, is a giant lunk of a dude, and clearly their mom's favorite. Frank drives a tow truck, but that doesn't mean here what it does to you and me. Tow drivers in this world are a fiercely competitive lot, driving heavily reinforced trucks equipped with police scanners so they can get to all the best wrecks first, secure the salvage rights to the ruined cars, all the while having to fight off the Carboys before they steal all the best parts. Jimmy rides along with Frank that night, and we get a firsthand look at how little control the authorities have over the Carboys. If they can just manage to sign over the contract for the wreck so they can hightail it back to HQ before one of them gets shot or beaten, they're thrilled.

The next night, Jimmy sneaks off with Frank's prized red 1956 Chevy for his date with Carmen, and they head off to the Star Drive-In to ignore a movie and get it on in the capacious back seat of the Chevy. While they engage in some heavy-duty canoodling, someone manages to steal the back wheels off the car, and when they go to Thompson, the manager, he tells them they won't be able to get any help until morning. The first clue that something is seriously wrong comes with the sunrise. As Jimmy opens the convertible top and stretches in the early morning air, he notices that the lot is full of stationary cars, many of them hosting the dwindling embers of campfires, and judging by how many of them have been converted into lean-tos and even elaborate hovels, most of them have been sitting there for a while. Uh oh.

All the people still at the drive-in, while not being exactly forthcoming, make it clear that Jimmy and Carmen won't be going anywhere soon, so they may as well make themselves at home. Even as he discovers that the fences are electrified, that the inmates are fed a steady diet of free booze and drugs and fast food to keep them complacent (and hey, if the alternative is a hardscrabble life fighting hulking tow truck drivers for car parts, free hooch and burgers sounds pretty good), that the drive-in and many like it are in fact designed to be concentration camps for Carboys and surrounded by heavily patrolled Security Roads where walking is illegal (and regular jail doesn't feed you cheese fries and weed), Jimmy is having none of it. He manages to steal some wheels and gasoline from a visiting police vehicle, but Thompson finds out and strips his engine just as he's ready to make his escape, and no one will believe he has gainful employment and isn't a thug to be imprisoned.

When the police bring in a herd of Asian refugees, a race riot ensues. In the confusion, Jimmy steals first a tow truck, and then a police SUV as the fuzz destroy half the compound chasing him. Remember what I said about car chases and explosions? Yeah. No one but no one does batshit crazy stunts like the Aussies.

The biggest glaring question the movie raises is, do people know about these drive-in concentration camps? Because if they do, then Jimmy deserves every crappy thing that happens to him and then some, taking a date to a place he knows full well he could be stuck in forever. And if they don't, how the hell not? How do you keep it a secret that anyone who goes to the drive-in for some nookie and a flick never comes back?

That said, it's certainly an original divergence from the usual car-chase-and-gun-battle affairs these Mad Max camp followers tend to be. I love the idea that instead of trying to actively police all the cities, they lure all the undesirables to one place with the promise of exploitation movies (among other things, you can see some of Trenchard-Smith's other movies, Stunt Rock and Escape 2000, playing in the background) and free fast food and drugs and alcohol, and most of them are aware they're in prison but they really don't give a shit and have no interest in trying to get out. I mean, if you had the choice of getting plastered and watching grindhouse flicks every day or walking miles through the Australian outback just to get shot for your trouble if you got anywhere near a road or town, what would you choose? Hell, if jail was like that for real I'd have killed someone a long time ago.

Bamboo Gods and Iron Men (1974)

Written by: Ken Metcalfe, Joseph Zucchero

Directed by: Cesar Gallardo

Starring: James Iglehart, Shirley Washington, Chiquito

This is the movie that I thought Hercules Against Karate was going to be. Minus being Italian. Kung fu and blaxploitation crossed paths more than a few times during the brief but incredibly prolific time of popularity of the latter genre. Mostly they involved the black characters knowing martial arts, though, like Dolemite's army of karate-kicking whores (pronounce it, “HOO-ers”, for added fun!). This time around, our smooth-as-a-bottle-of-Colt .45 hero is a champion prizefighter, but he's got his work cut out for him when his wife buys a Buddha statue with a priceless relic inside it.

Cal Jefferson and his wife Arlene are honeymooning in Hong Kong. She talks him into buying her the aforementioned statue and sends it back to their hotel via a courier. Later that day, the Jeffersons are enjoying a boat ride on a river, when they spot a man flailing in the water. This is Charley (his name is actually something like Tsui Li, but he's mute so he can't be constantly correcting Cal and this is an American movie, so it's funny to mispronounce foreign things I guess), and we know he's a good guy because we just saw him rescuing some random woman from being raped by a gang of thugs, who repaid his good citizenship by throwing him in the river.

Cal hauls Charley out and CPRs the water out of his lungs, which according to an ancient Chinese custom (really, is there any other kind?), Charley's life now belongs to Cal until the debt can be repaid in kind. Good thing for Cal, too, because that's going to come in handy a lot sooner than he thinks. A couple of bad dudes (who undoubtedly punch wooden doors into uniformly sized and shaped chunks and throw barrels at people in their spare time) named Ambrose and Leonardo want the Buddah statue because it holds they key to an ancient Chinese secret (once again, contemporary Chinese secrets are pretty thin on the ground) that, according to the centuries-dead scientist who discovered it, may be powerful enough to destroy all of China and maybe the world...

It's cute that AIP didn't think their audience would be able to tell the difference between Filipino and Chinese actors. Especially really famous ones like Vic Diaz, who plays a hotel clerk (instantly recognizable even if you don't know his name, because I'm pretty sure he's been in every Filipino exploitation movie ever made), and Chiquito, who plays Charley. That and the scenery in the Philippines doesn't look a great deal like China. Which is probably why they decided to have Cal and Arlene move their honeymoon from Hong Kong to Manila not long into the movie. Still, Charley looks about as Chinese as I do.

Even for someone like me, who genuinely enjoys corny old humor that would have been stale when my grandfather was my age, the comedy in this flick is pretty bad. What really saves it are the action scenes, although I think this was more by accident than intention. All the kung fu and fist fights, most notably our introduction to Charley when he beats up the gang of would-be rapists, are much less balletic than you expect to see in a martial arts movie – even a cheap one from the 70's. In fact, sometimes they're downright sloppy and clumsy, with people tripping over their own feet, failing to land blows, or stumbling over their opponents. I would wager that's because the stunt coordinator wasn't very good or didn't have much time to choreograph a good fight, or the actors weren't very good at the moves, or a combination of all of the above, rather than a deliberate decision to shoot for realism. But that's what they got, one way or the other, and even though it makes the fights a little less of an adrenaline rush to watch, I applaud the movie for its natural-looking fight action.

It's not going to change your life, but if you're looking to kill 90 minutes with some beers or maybe a bourbon or two (or both, if you hate your liver like I do), and a fun action flick that's a little rough around the edges but doesn't demand too much from its audience, you could certainly do a hell of a lot worse.

The Tomb (1986)

Written by: Kenneth J. Hall, T.L. Lankford

Directed by: Fred Olen Ray

Starring: Cameron Mitchell, John Carradine, Richard Hench

One of three movies he cranked out in 1986, this is probably the strangest of Ray's movies I've seen. I'm not talking about David Lynch strange, the movie's plot is pretty straightforward. I mean that absolutely nothing about this production seems to belong with any of the other pieces. It was distributed by MGM, looks like it cost considerably more than any of his other flicks I've seen (hell, even the credits look comparatively expensive), has some really solid cinematography to the point of looking like a major theatrical release picture, but it still has the awkward, wooden acting we've come to expect from these things (John Carradine, who is visibly reading his lines off a cue card on his desk, gives a better and more entertaining performance than everyone else in the cast combined, with maybe the exception of Cameron Mitchell), and the tone of the movie changes not just from scene to scene, but oftentimes within each individual scene itself. How many other movies can you think of that rip off two Universal monster movies, an Abbott and Costello routine, and have one of the main characters casually contemplate murder for profit and call an Egyptian a “towel-head” all in about three minutes?

After an odd little pre-credits sequence featuring a gratuitous Sybil Danning cameo that feels like it was filmed after the principal shoot and tacked on later, we catch up with our brave adventurer and tomb looter (I'm not going to say the “r” word, so just you shut up), John Banning, getting shitfaced and listening to possibly the most unlikely band you could possibly find in a seedy Egyptian bar. Unless seedy Egyptian bars are in the habit of hiring combination 80's synth-pop/Aretha Franklin impersonators – I really don't have much experience with seedy Egyptian bars so I guess that could be a thing. Anyway, his partner brings over a tomb guide named Youssef, who tells them he can get them into a tomb that no one has seen before. Once inside, they plot to kill their “towel-head” guide so they don't have to pay him (our hero, ladies and gentleman), but they are saved the trouble by Nefratis, an ancient blood-drinking demon. She emerges from her tomb and decapitates Youssef and kills Banning's partner as well, but Banning escapes with some of her treasures.

Back in the states, some of the artifacts end up in the hands of Dr. Howard Phillips (clever), and other end up in the possession of Dr. Stewart, rival archeologists. Phillips, however, knows what the items really are – sacred objects for the transference of souls – and who they belong to. He plans to use the golden scarab, the most powerful of the objects, to lure Nefratis to him and bargain with her for immortality. The soul-sucking hellbitch has other plans, however. She finds Banning (in another seedy bar, who'd have guessed?) and implants another scarab next to his heart to control him, forcing him to track the artifacts for her. When he fails to get the golden scarab, she kills Phillips herself and gets it back.

Stewart's assistant David and Phillips's niece, Helen, discover what's behind the killings one step ahead of the bumbling cop team on the case, by talking to Mr. Andoheb (John Carradine!), who fills them in on Nefratis. Seems that not only is she a blood drinking demon, but she keeps herself immortal by stealing the soul of a young woman each time she rises from her tomb, and wouldn't you know it, but Helen's exactly what she's been looking for...

And mixed all in there somewhere is a romantic comedy, a horror movie, an extremely tame skin flick, a slapstick wisecrackin' adventure comedy, and an ode to both the classic Universal monsters and some not-so-classic b-movies (the oafish detective chasing David and Helen and Dr. Stewart around quotes verbatim the, “there's been a murder...and someone's responsible” line from Plan 9 years before the pop culture cult following of the “worse movie ever made”). That makes me want to say that Ray and the screenwriters knew exactly who their audience was, but the schizophrenic quality of the movie with all its mixed genres and neck-breaking tonal changes gives the lie to that. I'm not sure they had a clue who their audience was, so they decided to go for broke and make everyone their audience. It's like Jesse Ventura in Predator, mowing down the guerillas with his ridiculous (yet thoroughly awesome) hand-held gatling gun. Aim? What aim? We just keep shooting til we hit everyone! Perhaps it was precisely because more money had been spent that they went that route – bigger dividends to pay back to more investors, meaning a riskier gamble so they'd better get some butts in seats any way they can.

In the end, I imagine that wound up hurting the movie more than helping it. Trying to have everyone as your audience in such a ham-fisted way would alienate most people, when the resulting movie is so damn strange. And yet, that's what endeared it to me. I am the audience for all those things (except the romantic comedy and being a mouth-breathing racist), and the insane cut-and-paste-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach makes this such a unique flick that it's kinda hard not to love.

So that's it for Fred Olen Ray-diation Poisoning 2012. I started out to have some fun ragging on a guy whose movies used to infuriate me, and wound up unexpectedly becoming a fan instead. What a blissful backfire. Maybe I'll make this a regular thing. I'll at least be revisiting Mr. Olen Ray's catalog for future reviews whether it's a themed thing or not. So Fred, if you're out there reading this, thanks for the good times, and I'm sorry about all the mean things I said in the past. It was all meant in good fun, no hard feelings, ok?

Sincerely,

Your newest fan

Evil Spawn (1987)

Written by: Kenneth J. Hall, Ted Newsom

Directed by: Kenneth J. Hall

Starring: Richard Harrison, Bobby Bresee, John Carradine (sort of)

Not too long ago, my friend Brandon and I were discussing how internet shopping, while putting everything you could possibly want at your fingertips, has taken most of the fun out of shopping. There was a time that every CD, book, or movie I owned had a story behind it. I could tell you when I bought it, who I was with, and what else happened that day, whether it was a special road trip, or just a regular afternoon of playing frolf and going out for Chinese at the mall and hitting the used CD racks at the local record store. “I clicked a button and it showed up in the mail” just doesn't make for a very interesting story.

The state of Minnesota doesn't have sales tax on clothes, so every year when summer was almost over and a new school season loomed, mom and I would head up to the Mall of America to replace whatever I'd grown out of the previous year. Of course, living in rural Iowa, going to a place like that was also an opportunity to indulge in all kinds of cool stores that we didn't have back home. One of them was a sci-fi book store, the name of which escapes me. It's long gone, as the Mall just isn't the groovy place it once was, but I remember them carrying a huge stock of Doctor Who books and toys, among other things. On one particular trip, I remember trying to decide between a book of H.R. Giger's artwork, and a fine tome called the Illustrated Dinosaur Movie Guide. Giger is great and all, but anyone who knows me would have no trouble guessing which book I picked.

The Dinosaur Movie Guide is an extremely incomplete chronology of capsule reviews and trivia about the films of Barbra Streisand. I kid, of course. But a lot of the movies it discussed had about as much to do with dinosaurs as Yentl did. Along with opening my eyes to the fact that there were still Godzilla movies in production and tantalizing me with all kinds of awesome-sounding things that actually did have dinosaurs in them, the book also included entries for stuff like Rawhead Rex and Yor, Hunter from the Future. These strange and wondrous horror flicks became instant must-sees. The book also provided me with one of my first illicit glimpses of breasts, as the poster art shown for this movie (which is even less deserving of inclusion than most of the stuff that got thrown in just because it had a monster in it) features star Bobby (in a bit of serendipity, I accidentally typed that as “Booby” on the first try) Bresee's chesticles. Now, almost two decades later, I finally got my grubby mitts on this charmingly stupid load of crap (and yet I still haven't managed to track down a copy of Yor, which makes me sad). Granted, this wasn't one of the flicks I've been dreaming of seeing for almost two decades, and I'm kinda glad for that. When I finally saw it, Rawhead Rex became one of my favorite 80's monster flicks, but Evil Spawn wouldn't have been able to live up to twenty minutes worth of anticipation, let alone twenty years.

The movie opens with a bit of text telling us that a Venus probe called Odyssey is returning to Earth bearing a cargo of microorganisms for examination, but some eeeeevil scientists are planning to use them for greedy and illegal purposes. Then we get a look at the Odyssey itself, and it's the spaceship from Planet of the Dinosaurs! Come to think of it, that might be why this movie got included in a book about dinosaur movies, but that's a pretty tenuous connection (although there is an alternate cut called Alien Within, which has a load of different footage and who knows, maybe they recycled some of the dinosaur FX in that one).

One of the nefarious purposes those scientists use the microbes for is as an all-purpose fountain of youth, and that's just what aging actress Lynn Roman needs to get the starring role that will restart her ailing career. Too bad the side effects include dizziness, amnesia, irritable bowels, restless leg syndrome, and turning into some kind of giant bug monster that eats lying agents and sleazy directors and role-stealing young starlets.

And that's pretty much the plot. It's a fast, cheap, slapdash remake of The Wasp Woman, basically. Even though he didn't direct the whole thing, I'm including this as part of Fred Olen Ray-diation Poisoning because he produced the various versions of it (and if I'm any judge of style, had more than a little involvement in the creative process beyond finding money), and personally shot the scene with John Carradine as the mad scientist. That scene was shot as a generic piece of filler and the dialogue was kept intentionally vague so that it could be used in many different movies so they could claim the honor of “starring John Carradine” to get suckers like me to watch them.

I was originally going to do his most current picture, Dino Wolf, this week, but it was such a dull flick I couldn't think of anything to say about it. And wouldn't you know it, another little piece of serendipity, this one just happened to come in the mail from Netflix and I found out while doing preliminary research for Dino Wolf that I had accidentally ordered yet another Fred Olen Ray movie, which makes it even more appropriate for the theme of this little project. While this flick is, on a technical level, far worse than Dino Wolf, that is also its strength and saving grace, because that's what makes it so much more entertaining. There's nothing like a little technical polish to make a crappy monster movie just good enough to be boring. Evil Spawn's charm comes from the recycled FX footage, the hastily shot padding scenes like the one with the couple out looking for their cat – the loss of which the man blames on the woman's insatiable hunger for tacos, and the fact that the production was so impoverished they didn't have the time or money for extra takes when the actors flubbed their lines. Hell, there's a radio announcer talking about the killings at one point while the camera just gazes lovingly at the stereo one of the main characters is listening to, and HE FUCKS UP HIS LINES! They didn't even bother to fix the voiceover parts! And if your fetish happens to be blood running down a naked girl's back and into her butt crack, this one's for you.

Clocking in at under 75 minutes (making it even closer kin to not only its direct ancestor The Wasp Woman, but to all those cheap 50's and 60's horror programmers), the movie doesn't wear out its welcome. The biggest misstep it makes is Lynn Roman's constant railing against ending her career in a bunch of cheap b-horror movies, which I imagine the writers thought was really clever. So clever, in fact, that they made her say it every fourth or fifth line. If you're looking for some cheesy monster fun to watch with friends, you could do worse.

Scalps (1983)

Written by: T.L. Lankford, Fred Olen Ray

Directed by: Fred Olen Ray

Starring: Jo-Ann Robinson, Richard Hench, Roger Maycock

It seems like just about every b-movie reviewer acquires a cinematic nemesis if they're in the game long enough. Either a particular filmmaker, a producer, a studio, or a franchise that just grinds their gears and makes them see red and spit fire. Years and years ago when my friends and I discovered the wild world of online reviewing, Andrew Borntreger taught us the fear and loathing of George Kennedy. Back in the days of the Tomb of Anubis, the boss man had a blood feud going with Vidmark/Tri-Mark. Just mention Andreas Schnaas around El Santo and he breaks out in hives. If you've been following me since at least the days of the Tomb, you'll know that my celluloid arch enemy is Fred Olen Ray.

I've given Ray money intentionally a couple of times, purchasing titles by other directors on his Retromedia label, but I have never once watched one of his movies on purpose. Based on DVD commentaries and the little intro segments he does for Retromedia sometimes, he actually seems like a pretty likeable guy, so I feel a little bad for declaring him my enemy. It's not even that his movies, should you go into them knowing what they are, are particularly awful by the standards (or lack thereof) of taste championed by this and many other sites. It's just that they always sound (and look, judging by the cover art) a lot better than they really are. This is at least the fourth time I can think of that I've rented a movie based on an interesting description or a cool bit of poster art, not paying any attention to cast or crew (except that one I picked because it had Charles Napier in it), only to pop it in, see the words “a film by Fred Olen Ray”, and yell, “SON OF A BITCH!”

Over the years I've become convinced that Fred has found where I live, gotten a copy of my house key, and sneaks into my bedroom at night, whispering subliminal suggestions to rent his movies into my sleeping ears. And that's why, for the rest of March, while everyone else is talking about basketboring – I mean ball – here at Cinemasochist Apocalypse, it's Fred Olen Ray-diation poisoning month.

This will mark the first time that I have knowingly sought out a Fred Olen Ray picture, but the whole thing kicked off with another accidental one, when Scalps showed up in my mail slot from Netflix. At this point, my queue is maxed out at 500 movies, and the stuff I'm getting now has been on there so long I don't even remember adding it, and sometimes even what it's about. So when I opened the envelope and saw the nifty artwork on the disc, I was intrigued. Then I looked at the paper sleeve to read the description, and right there, under the director listing was, you guessed it, Fred Olen Ray. SON OF A BITCH!

Professor Machen (Kirk Alyn, the first actor to play Superman on screen in the 1948 serial) is a rogue (or so it's implied through his introductory scene where he's reamed out by his boss at the university for illegal activities pertaining to digging for artifacts on sacred Indian ground) archeology professor who is planning a major dig with some of his best students. Unfortunately for him, it's just as illegal as all those other digs he just got in trouble for, and so boss lady (Carroll Borland, who played Luna Mora in Mark of the Vampire with Bela Lugosi back in 1935!) sticks him doing inventory of the school's artifact collections all weekend.

He sends his students out without him, promising to meet them on Sunday before they all have to return to the campus, and so the six students take off in the one of those glorious 70's vintage station wagons that are as big as the antimatter space buzzard from The Giant Claw, or as big as a battleship to you regular folks. They stop at a gas station on the way to the badlands, and an old Indian warns them not past the black trees, because the land is cursed by the spirit of an Indian warrior named Black Claw. Despite the group's psychic hippy, D.J., having visions of a creepy, desiccated Indian ghost head and claiming they're all going to die, they press on, and wouldn't you know it, they all die!

Shortly after they arrive at their destination, the spirit of Black Claw possesses Randy, and he starts picking them off one by one. As the cast gets whittled down amidst the wonderfully atmospheric badlands locations, the spirit decides that a psychic girl with all kinds of latent potential is going to be a better host than a big beefy guy, and Professor Machen is in for a nasty surprise when he shows up Sunday morning.

Scalps was Ray's third movie as a director, and oddly enough it looks more accomplished than a lot of his more recent stuff. So much of his output these days is intended for the SyFy Channel or similar markets, and anything shot on digital video pretty much looks like a TV show. This flick was still from the days when, if you wanted to make a movie, even a low budget one, you had to actually make a damn movie. You had to lug cameras and lights and film and a full crew out in to the desert, with no computers or digital anything. Shooting on film automatically lends a production an air of legitimacy that a cheap made for TV movie just doesn't have.

It's surprisingly gory and has a pretty rough rape scene in it considering Ray says in the commentary track that he's never seen Last House On the Left because he doesn't want to see graphic sexual violence. In fact, this flick was one of the most heavily censored movies of its time (which seems odd since, despite this being gory for a Fred Olen Ray movie, it isn't all that graphic considering some of its contemporaries), and several separate sources from Canada, Germany, and the U.S. had to be spliced together to get as close to the original cut as possible for the DVD release.

It was helpful to listen to that commentary in understanding how the movie turned out the way it did. There are scenes spliced in seemingly at random throughout, of the exceptionally competent (for such a low budget flick) makeup effects. In Ray's original cut they weren't there, but when the movie was sold to a distributor they decided it moved too slowly, so they found every bit of FX footage they could get (including test shots that were never intended for the movie!) and slapped it in any old place. The result damn near ruined what could have, from what Ray described, been a solid little horror flick. The desert locations (shot on a ranch that is now owned by Alice Cooper) add a great deal of atmosphere to the proceedings, and the soundtrack, although severely overused (there are only a couple of different cues, and they are played in an almost nonstop loop through the whole movie), is effective. If it had been used more sparingly it would have been great.

I think if we could have seen Ray's original vision for the movie, it would have been one of his best. I realize that seems like damning with faint praise considering what I've said about his oeuvre up to this point, and it certainly isn't Evil Dead, but I honestly think without those random FX shots breaking up the movie's momentum, and with some restraint used with the music, Scalps could have been an excellent low budget horror flick. The fact that it still has a cult following at all speaks to that vision shining through the hack job the distributor did on it.

When I thought up this little theme project, I figured it was just going to be good for a few laughs at my constantly accidentally renting Fred Olen Ray movies. Instead, it's beginning to seem a little therapeutic. I think by the end of this set of reviews I may have made my peace with Mr. Olen Ray and try to watch some more of his movies, y'know, on purpose.