Saturday, October 31, 2026

Cardboard Science: Once They Were Men, Now They Are Land Crabs

Year: 1957
Director: Roger Corman
Cast: Richard Garland, Pamela Duncan, Russell Johnson
Run Time: 1 hour 3 minutes

Happy Halloween, y'all!

We have reached my final contribution to our annual Great Switcheroo with Hunter Allen at Kinemalogue. Because it's our 13th year doing this, in addition to me assigning him three 1980s slasher movies from Census Bloodbath and him giving me three titles from his 1950s sci-fi project Cardboard Science, we have selected notable sub-subgenres. In my case, it was the holiday/special occasion slasher, and in his it was killer arthropods.

How he managed to find movies about three different types of arthropod that all came out in 1957, I'll never know. But now that we've covered The Giant Mantis and The Black Scorpion, we've hit Attack of the Crab Monsters. After kicking off this month with a Nathan Juran joint, we're coming full circle with another repeat Cardboard Science offender: cult film legend Roger Corman. The notorious low-budget director and producer was just transitioning from cheap Westerns to cheap sci-fi movies in the mid-1950s, and we catch him between two previous titles, this having come out after It Conquered the World but before X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.

You really never know what you're gonna get with Corman, other than a great behind-the-scenes story about how he turned two dimes and a dream into a movie. His quick turnarounds and shoestring budgets sometimes led to works of genius, but other times... Well, I'm sorry to say it, but other times, they led to Attack of the Crab Monsters.

Oops, did I show my hand too soon?

The movie follows a group of scientists (who are mostly interchangeable, but one of whom is played by Mel Welles, who would go on to play Mr. Mushnik in Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors) and sailors (one of whom is played by Ed Nelson of Invasion of the Saucer Men) who have arrived on a remote island to try and solve the disappearance of the previous crew that was studying there. Dale Brewer (Richard Garland, who possesses a chin so clefted that he must have needed a Q-Tip to clean it) and Martha Hunter (Pamela Duncan), the biologists who study land and sea respectively, are the only characters who stand out, mostly because she's the one woman and he's dating her.

Our leads, imagining what a 1950s B-movie might be like if there were two or more female characters.

I will say that the opening of Attack of the Crab Monsters gave me no particular reason to worry. It effectively wielded cheap filmmaking techniques to make something dynamic. The animated opening credits sequence gives way into an ominous voiceover playing over a cloudy sky, and all in all I felt like I was in safe hands.

Those hands then loosened their grip and dropped me into the middle of infinite scenes of endless blather. I know enough not to expect that the titular monster(s) in a movie like this will be onscreen for more than five minutes, but there is so little driving these characters. They just kind of mill about for a good long while. Watching them uselessly speculate about what could possibly be wrong (personally, I got a big clue from reading the title) was hardly thrilling.

At a certain point it seems like a plot might break out via a love triangle with handyman Hank Chapman (Russell Johnson of This Island Earth and It Came from Outer Space), but that goes absolutely nowhere. And there you have the majority of Attack of the Crab Monsters. That and some sorta neat scuba diving sequences where the stunt divers are swimming around with some very real, very enormous fish. 

However, like many sci-fi movies of its era, it's mostly just about people running into and out of caves. 

At least they're wet caves. That's a change from the dry caves outside Santa Clarita, where we usually spend our time.

Although you'll spend about 40 minutes begging for the crabs to show up, you'll fervently regret that wish once it's granted. That's not entirely because the crabs look awful, though they do. 

Hoo boy, do they look dumb. The weird thing is that I assume they used real crabs at some point in production during forced-perspective shots. Or at the very least, they clearly used photographs when building the monsters. So when they were gluing those big stupid, squinty, suspicious eyes onto the creatures' shells, you'd think at some point they might have noticed that crab eyes don't look like that.

I'm pretty sure they modeled Carl from Up after this guy.

Yes, crabs do have eyes. But not human-style eyes. And certainly not ones that, when they open up, look like somebody is peeling the foreskin back from a beach ball.

The crab monsters also talk, which was a surprise. Not a good one. The reason for this is stupid (they can absorb the minds and memories of their victims) and the execution, while sometimes effectively eerie (the actors playing the dead characters voice the crabs, with flat, echoey intonations that do often accurately reflect a monster attempting to mimic humanity), is mostly just embarrassingly hokey. Why make the crabs talk? They can't be reasoned with. They're dispatched in the same way that any old 1950s monster might be. It just plain doesn't work.

That said, I'm glad we finally got around to a radioactive monster this month! I was surprised that neither the mantis nor the scorpion became giant and evil because of humanity tampering in God's domain. 

So alas, we must end this year's Switcheroo with a whimper rather than a bang. But I had fun, and I hope you did too! Now we return to our regularly scheduled programming of non-stop slasher movies.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

*This movie is weirdly obsessed with using metal as a conductor for ghosts and/or crabs. I don't really understand what they were going for, but I'm fascinated that 2003's Dreamcatcher is somehow not the first movie in which a handgun is used as a telephone.
*I'm aware that there is such a thing as a "land crab," but it drove me nuts that everyone kept saying "land crab" instead of just "crab." I'm sure the Land Crab Council was grateful for their efforts.

The morality of the past, in the future!:

*Even though Martha is ostensibly on hand to do science, nobody else is nursing people's wounds or doing the cooking.
*One of the sailors says that the crabs sound like a kid dragging a stick across a picket fence, which felt so deliciously 1950s to me. Stephen King probably fainted with delight when he heard that line.

Sensawunda:

*I'm in love with the production logo that opens the film, which I have to assume is not a joke? Somehow?

*Somebody actually says the following line out loud: "I hope that man's death is not an omen of things to come." Honestly, I'm inclined to blame him for everyone's deaths more than the crab monsters. He jinxed the hell out of them!

TL;DR: Attack of the Crab Monsters is cheap, and often not charmingly so.
Rating: 5/10

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture 
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)
2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)
2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)
2022: Tarantula (1955) The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
2023: Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957)
2024: Attack of the Puppet People (1958)
2025: X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963) The Spider (1958) The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
2026: The Deadly Mantis (1957) The Black Scorpion (1957) Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)

2023: Blood Rage (1987)
2024: Sleepaway Camp (1983)
2025: Superstition (1982) The Carpenter (1988) Visiting Hours (1982)
Also sprach at 1 comment:
Labels: , , , ,

Wednesday, October 28, 2026

Census Bloodbath: Wild Turkey

Note: This movie was only available to me in unsubtitled Turkish, so take my review with a huge grain of salt. But also we're finally done with catching up with slashers we missed in my original round of research! At long last, we can return to the slashers of 1986, already in progress.

Year:
1986
Director:
Cevat Okçugil
Cast: Nihat Yigit, Sevim Özün, Yadigâr Ejder
Run Time:
1 hour 25 minutes

Plot: Balta (Hatchet) follows Murat (Nihat Yigit), a karate student and fruit seller who lives in the woods with his sensei (Kudret Karadağ). The woods are descended upon by a troupe of tourists of widely varying ages plus an ax murderer credited as Baltali Deli, or "Ax Crazy" (Yadigar Ejder). 

One of the tourists, Nadya (Sevim Özün), develops a crush on Murat, much to the consternation of her boyfriend and/or husband and/or father. I don't know how exactly they're linked, but he's not a fan of Murat. Anyway, she's clearly the Final Girl because she has a name (four of her cohort are credited as "Foreign Tourist," two as "German Tourist," and one as "Russian Tourist"). When Ax Crazy begins going after her friends, she runs to Murat for aid.

Analysis: So far, it turns out that I kind of like Turkish slashers, even though they've given me almost no reason to. I feel about Balta a similar way to how I felt about 1988's Psikopat, which is that it's charming in spite of its low budget and thorough ineptitude.

Like... this is an 85-minute slasher movie where the first kill doesn't happen until the 62-minute mark. The first hour is spent not getting to know the tourists (which is what literally any slasher in its right mind would do) but rather following Murat around as he commutes back and forth from his training in the woods to his job (and various good deeds) in town. Meanwhile, Ax Crazy kind of just hangs out, lurking behind bushes and leering creepily at Murat and the tourists but not actually doing fuck-all for what feels like a few days.

I do like that Ax Crazy is wearing what appears to be fur-covered Ugg boots, but the kills he rapidly doles out when the time comes aren't particularly inspired. He delivers a couple whacks with the axe to various body parts and his victims are smeared with blood. That's about it. They definitely didn't have the budget to do anything fun like a decapitation. 

That said, the kill sequences do have this odd and somewhat intriguing habit of going black-and-white when the murder is happening, which is probably meant to hide the color of their fake blood (y'all, this only worked in Psycho because the whole thing was in black-and-white). Oh, and Yadigar Ejder isn't a particularly good performer, exaggeratedly hooting and hollering after each death like he's in a silent comedy.

And yet... I really don't know, but I didn't have a bad time. I think the majority of why I didn't hate watching Balta is the fact that Nihat Yigit is 1) actually a talented martial artist, and 2) a truly affable screen presence. We mainly just watch him wandering around doing nice things for people (which kind of gives him the same "golden-hearted hero of the people" vibe that Santo has), but there's something about watching him march his short king ass around (in the signature waddle of people who are way too muscular for how tiny they are) that is simply endearing. He truly just seems like a nice guy who's having a nice day.

Is that a reason to watch a slasher movie? Of course not. But I'm 321 movies deep on this project, and I'll take what I can get.


Killer: Ax Crazy (Yadigâr Ejder)
Final Girl: Nadya (Sevim Özün)
Best Kill: Nadya's jealous man is axed several times in the backside, either in the back of his thighs or straight-up in his butt. Either way, it's a weird way to murder somebody. I dug it.
Sign of the Times: These tourists have some killer outfits between them.


Scariest Moment: Ax Crazy follows one of the tourists as she wanders into the woods.
Weirdest Moment: One of the tourists' hats flaps up and down along with his snores while he's sleeping.
Champion Dialogue: N/A
Body Count: 8
  1. Sleeveless Tee Guy is axed in the throat.
  2. Short Hair Gal is axed in the throat.
  3. Hoca is axed to death.
  4. Nadya's Boyfriend/Husband/Father is axed in the backside.
  5. Denim Jacket Lady is axed in the back.
  6. Bucket Hat Guy is axed in the chest and smacked across the face with the ax.
  7. Leather Jacket Lady is strangled.
  8. Denim Jacket Guy is axed in the shoulder.
TL;DR: Balta could be a lot more of a slog (because it isn't good) and yet it's watchable.
Rating: 4/10
Also sprach at No comments:
Labels: ,

Tuesday, October 20, 2026

Census Bloodbath: Hot Pursuit

Year:
1985
Director:
Taylor Wong
Cast:
Lo Meng, Jason Pai Piao, Yin Cheung Joh
Run Time:
1 hour 26 minutes

Plot: The prologue of Pursuit of a Killer (Kong woo liu duen) follows a group of Mainlanders who are escaping to Hong Kong. One of them, Ya Zong (Chun-Chung Tong), gets his leg caught in a bear trap as the authorities are closing in, so the rest of the group is forced to abandon him. The four abandoners: the hunky, misogynistic Ye Hong (Lo Meng of the Ip Man movies); The Girl, Gao Mei (Yin Cheung Joh of Escape from Coral Cove); mustachioed Lu Bao (Ngai Tim-Choi and, when the character is older and more rotund, Hsiang Lin Yin of Hell Has No Boundary); and the characteristic-free He Min (Keung Hon of Pituitary Hunter).

Once they get to Hong Kong, life on the other side is not as peachy as they imagined, and they get caught up the criminal underground working for the triads. After a botched robbery, the three men are sent to prison. Five years later, a mysterious black-gloved killer is tracking down the men as they get released from prison one by one. Local cop Inspector Wang (Jason Pai Piao) and his hotheaded sidekick Lei Kung (Sun Chien) spring Ye Hong out of prison early to use him as bait, and while he is constantly trying to escape them, he is also hellbent on tracking down the killer.

Analysis: Made in the waning days of the Shaw Brothers Studio (shortly before they focused almost entirely on television production for several decades), the Hong Kong giallo movie Pursuit of a Killer does bear a certain sense of decadence and decay.

However, like a particularly stinky cheese, it's going to appeal to some people's palates considerably. I'm halfway there. The obligatory kung fu sequences are lively and frenetic, often featuring a dozen guys fighting one another at once while rushing down narrow hallways or flooding courtyards. Even the combat between two or three fighters tends to be dynamic, with one featuring a fighter tumbling all over a bed (and the naked woman on top of the bed) and another taking place in a film studio and making use of every inch of the lushly designed space.

This movie is also horny, and exuberantly so. It's the rare 1980s exploitation movie that shows male and female flesh more or less equally (and if the scales are imbalanced, it would be weighted toward the men, which almost never happens in a film of this vintage) and it luxuriates in a sleazy, offbeat, ambient eroticism that can sometimes be quite enjoyable. 

When the movie's characters actually have sex instead of just being naked, that's where things take a turn. Pursuit of a Killer is unfailingly misogynistic, or at least its main character is. Sex in this movie is about taking, and the callous, often violent way that women are treated is deeply unpleasant, even by the standards of a 1980s slasher movie. Actually, Ye Hong just kind of sucks top to bottom. 

It's mostly unpleasant to spend time with him, so it's a bummer that this is what we're forced to do for about an hour once the movie finally settles into its plot.

Speaking of... The unfocused first act makes it so unclear what the movie is actually about that I was thinking this might not turn out to be a slasher at all. However, once things got rolling and a black-gloved killer murdered a man in a shower, I knew I couldn't deny this movie entry into the Census Bloodbath roster. Hong Kong gialli always blend genres, so including such tried-and-true slasher elements in multiple scenes basically makes this the slasheriest of them all, even if it's not really that slashery at all. 

Its slasher elements aren't especially exciting, with very little blood and few true "body count" killings in the second and third acts. Even though there are plenty of dead bodies to go around, they fit more in the action-crime movie mold. Plus, even though this is ostensibly a whodunit, the killer reveal is the most obvious thing in the world, so it doesn't really pack a punch.

I suppose it's not half bad aesthetically, and I'm not solely referring to the shots of a half-naked Lo Meng. There is a latent visual and auditory vibrance here that rears its head sometimes. I'm especially partial to the dangling, jingling charms on the killer's boots, as well as a shot of a conversation that is staged near a mirrored wall so you can see the expressions of both participants. But all that being said, Pursuit of a Killer is a good-not-great Hong Kong giallo that I have no particular interest in rewatching, whereas I'd welcome a second visit with, say, Night Caller or He Lives by Night.


Killer: Ya Zong (Chun-Chung Tong)
Final Girl: Gao Mei (Yin Cheung Joh)
Best Kill: Ye Hong's criminal father figure Uncle Zhi is shot through the chest with a harpoon, which is always a fun one for a slasher movie if you can swing it.
Sign of the Times: The mall that the main characters rob in the first act is a gloriously 1980s structure. If I ever got a time machine, I'd definitely stop by on my way to curing the Black Plague or whatever.
Scariest Moment: The hanging barrels inside a seemingly empty room begin to sway around Ye Hong.
Weirdest Moment: A lizard crawls across the naked torso of a sleeping Ye Hong, which causes him to unconsciously flex his pecs.
Champion Dialogue: “Someone is having vengeance."
Body Count: 11; give or take some people that may have died during kung fu battles, but whose fates are ultimately unclear.
  1. Brawler #1 is impaled with a sword.
  2. Brawler #2 is impaled with a sword.
  3. Old Man (Brawler) has his neck snapped.
  4. Old Man (Driver) dies of a heart attack.
  5. Lu Bao is slashed repeatedly with a box cutter.
  6. He Min is shot to death.
  7. Guard is killed offscreen.
  8. Uncle Zhi is shot through the chest with a harpoon.
  9. Xiao Hu is garroted with a chain.
  10. Ye Hong is shot.
  11. Ya Zong is shot repeatedly by the cops.
TL;DR: Pursuit of a Killer is a frenetic, wild Hong Kong giallo, which is to its benefit, but it's still a bit of a slog to spend time with its protagonist.
Rating: 6/10
Also sprach at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Friday, October 16, 2026

Cardboard Science: The Scorp Trials

Year: 1957
Director: Edward Ludwig
Cast: Richard Denning, Carlos Rivas, Mara Corday
Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

We're halfway to Halloween, so it's time for the second installment of this year's Great Switcheroo with Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue. In honor of this being the 13th year of our annual tradition, we have selected specific sub-subgenres for one another. In exchange for three 1980s slashers about holidays and special occasions, he has assigned me a trio of 1950s B-movies about killer arthropods.

This time around, we're looking at The Black Scorpion. Although director Edward Ludwig isn't nearly as well known around these parts as The Deadly Mantis' Nathan Juran, this remains an All-Star Switcheroo thanks to other folks behind the camera. For one thing, we have Jack Dietz on hand. You probably know him best as the one-time operator of the Cotton Club, but he also produced the Ray Harryhausen classic The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Just four years later, he got to collaborate with another iconic stop-motion artist. That's right, this time around we're dealing with work from the legendary Willis H. O'Brien, Harryhausen's mentor who brought us King motherfuckin' Kong.

And it shows.

The Black Scorpion starts off with a bang. Literally. The first shot is a volcano exploding. And the second and third. You see, the rural Mexican town of San Lorenzo is being besieged with volcanic activity, which is what brings geologists Dr. Hank Scott (Richard Denning of Creature from the Black Lagoon) and Dr. Arturo Ramos (Carlos Rivas of The Beast of Hollow Mountain) into their midst. However, seismic issues are the least of their worries, as it turns out that a species of prehistoric giant scorpions has been unleashed upon the nearby countryside, their underground hideout having been broken open by an earthquake.

As the doctors scramble to help local authorities defeat the menace, Hank begins to fall for Teresa Alvarez (Mara Corday of The Giant Claw and Tarantula), a ranch owner with an hourglass figure to beat the band.

If he fought the scorpion with as much intensity as he pursued Teresa, this movie would only be 40 minutes long. And even then, it's just because the scorpion doesn't show up for the first 30 minutes.

First of all, for a 1950s movie set in Mexico, it actually seems to view Mexicans as human beings for the most part. It even has some in the movie! As far as I can tell, not every Mexican character is played by a Mexican actor or even a Latinx actor (I don't have Corday's 23andMe results, but I'm pretty sure she's just brunette), but there are at least four confirmed Mexican or Mexican-American actors in this cast, and that basically makes this the Roma of 1957.

There are plenty of weird comments about, say, tortillas, tequila, and rattlesnakes, but The Black Scorpion allows itself to depict a Mexico that is just as full of educated, boring urbanites as any old monster movie.

Thankfully, because of this, the characters and story aren't half bad. This is good news, because, as I've said, we have to spend at least half an hour with them before a scorpion is even mentioned. Honestly, the first act is a fun enough "figure out what the hell is going on" yarn that I wasn't even missing him. However, I really started to feel this movie's run time (no 1950s B-movie has the right to edge this perilously close to 90 minutes) once the monster movie plot proper kicked in. 

At that point, the plot falls back on too many hoary monster movie cliches (ie. scientists explaining random bullshit followed by long discussions about how to defeat the monster - the answer is almost always "an even bigger gun!") to be particularly worthwhile.

The monster scenes, though! Oh, the monster scenes. They're far from perfect, but they're a hell of a lot of fun. I personally grew quite bored with the sequence set in their underground domain, which is aping King Kong to the degree that O'Brien literally re-used models from that movie. It's not particularly interesting to see the scorpions fight someone their own size, especially when those monsters have much less unique designs.

However, when the scorpions step out into the human world, we get a series of scenes that are real barn-burners. The stop-motion scorpion looks superb, with eight legs, two claws, and a tail all whipping around in ways that feel perfectly organic and terrifyingly uncontrollable. 

Unfortunately, the movie has a penchant of cutting to close-ups of a puppet scorpion face, and that's where the wheels fall off. 

They don't fall so much as plummet into oblivion.

The face isn't actually terrible. It's thrillingly wet, with moist eyes and non-stop drool dripping from its mouth. Plus, there is a lot of motion thanks to the puppet's moving eyes and articulated pincers and jaw. However, in addition to looking goofy as all get out, these close-ups stick out from the film at odd angles.

It's quite clear that they were shot separately from the rest of the film and randomly inserted later on. The lighting conditions and setting of the close-ups are often completely different from those of the wide shots, and they often break the 180-degree line within the scenes where they're placed, making the whole thing feel muddled and confusing. Which is not the feeling you want to have at the same time that you're struggling to process those googly eyes.

Those close-ups aside, though, The Black Scorpion is actually quite well shot. The black-and-white cinematography has tremendous contrast and depth, and while you would never be able to fool yourself into thinking you're watching, say Casablanca, most of the individual images in the human scenes are quite pleasant to look at, especially when compared to some of the flat, washed-out tripe that gets ladled onto other B-movies of this vintage.

Ultimately, I'd cut a good 15 to 25 minutes out of the movie, but even as it stands, it's an immensely pleasurable watch. The Black Scorpion hasn't scuttled into my top tier of Cardboard Science pictures, alongside movies like Godzilla, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Attack of the Puppet People, and Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman. However, I'm very happy to slot it into the "silver medal" tier with Journey to the Center of the Earth and It Conquered the World.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

*The scientist character keeps calling the scorpion's venom "poison," which is not correct! I know this is a pedantic point to make, but he's a scientist! He should know things.

The morality of the past, in the future!:

*Honestly, I think I'm mostly just impressed by The Black Scorpion's depiction of Mexico because all I really have to compare it to in Cardboard Science is The Cyclops, which famously decided that "Guayjorm" was a credible name for a Mexican town.
*Because seriously, in this movie, not only does English seem to be the national language of Mexico, it's the type of English you might hear coming out of Katharine Hepburn's mouth.
*I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure that Mara Corday says "grazie" to a group of vaqueros.

Sensawunda:

*I adore the scene where Hank and Arturo think they hear a rattlesnake and Hank pulls out his gun. Once they discover that the noise is coming from an abandoned baby playing with a rattle in its crib, Hank makes a sardonic joke about fatherhood while using the gun to point at the baby. 
*I'm also a huge fan of the man who is tasked with shooting an electrified harpoon at the scorpion, misses, and ends up electrifying himself while trying to reload the weapon. Cinema could use more hapless failures like him in serious movies. It lends them a sense of realism.

TL;DR: The Black Scorpion is a bit goofy and overlong, but otherwise a hell of a solid entry in the 1950s giant bug movie subgenre.
Rating: 7/10

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture 
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)
2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)
2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)
2022: Tarantula (1955) The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
2023: Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957)
2024: Attack of the Puppet People (1958)
2025: X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963) The Spider (1958) The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
2026: The Deadly Mantis (1957) The Black Scorpion (1957) Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)

2023: Blood Rage (1987)
2024: Sleepaway Camp (1983)
2025: Superstition (1982) The Carpenter (1988) Visiting Hours (1982)
Also sprach at 3 comments:
Labels: , , ,

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

Census Bloodbath: Guess Who's Coming To Dinner

Year:
1985
Director:
John McCauley
Cast:
Molly Cheek, Christopher Holder, Tony Crupi
Run Time:
1 hour 26 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: In the prologue of Deadly Intruder, we see mental institution inmate Robert Harvey (shown only in silhouette) escaping after killing guards Wayne (porn star and criminal scammer Ben Dover) and Jim (Kurt Bryant, a stunt performer and stunt coordinator who has been a part of basically every marathon I've ever done, having played one of the costumed Ghostface killers in Scream 2 and worked on titles including Fatal Games, Maniac Cop, Wishmaster, Candyman: Day of the Dead, Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, 2009’s Friday the 13th, 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Curse of La Llorona, and, for some reason, The Jane Austen Book Club). I use the phrase "we see" rhetorically, because this scene is so dark you can only see murky shapes shifting like blobs in a sludge-colored lava lamp.

Midvale's Captain Pritchett (Stuart Whitman of Vultures, making this an accidental Census Bloodbath double feature) assigns his deputies Carlos (Santos Morales) and Danny (Daniel Greene, who had the good fortune to later play Elvira’s love interest in Elvira, Mistress of the Dark) to keep abreast of the situation. But first, Danny needs to go to a dinner party thrown by his friend Jessie (Molly Cheek, and if she looks to you like the type of person who'd react well to seeing Jason Biggs engaging in sexual congress with baked goods, you'd be wrong, as proven by her role as Jim's Mom in American Pie).

Jessie has just had an unsettling encounter with a strange, axe-wielding drifter (Tony Crupi, who also provided the screenplay for this very movie), but she won't let that put her off from serving a roast to her friends. The invite list: Danny; Danny's shrill and irritating girlfriend Cathy (Marcy Hansen); clothing shop owner and amateur chef John (Danny Bonaduce, firmly out of the "child actor" phase of his career); John's amiable wife Amy (Laura Melton); and John's new employee Bob (Christopher Holder), a Canadian journalist who's taking part-time jobs for a story, and who John is trying to set up with Jessie.

Naturally, people in the orbit of the dinner party keep turning up dead. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here.

Analysis: I had a pretty good time watching Deadly Intruder, but I'm honestly not even sure why. It's an absolute mess of a motion picture. But it doesn't have much of an attention span, at least. It's about four movies welded together, so whenever the movie gets boring (and boy, does it get boring), you don't have to wait more than 10 minutes until it becomes something else.

Nevertheless, I'm hard-pressed to find much here that is an absolute good. I do like the movie's score, which is a cool, layered synthy track that is the rare 1980s slasher score to ape John Carpenter without ripping off Halloween. It feels a lot more like one of his action scores, and that adds an exciting new texture to the proceedings. Unfortunately, composer John McCauley (who also aped Carpenter in that he pulled double duty by directing Deadly Intruder too) clearly only made the one three-minute main theme, so it's repeated ad nauseam and constantly crops up in scenes that don't really match its vibe.

And I suppose the acting isn't bad. Except Marcy Hansen's, but she is thankfully only in a couple scenes before her character kicks the bucket. While there are a number of cast members who only ever appeared in this one movie (a hallmark of the shitty 1980s slasher movie), the majority of the actors had long, if not particularly noteworthy careers, and their decent performances here prove why they had what it takes to become reliable fourth bananas. 

Oh, and Molly Cheek is a great screamer, which is good news because Jessie is one of the least active final girls we've had in a long time. She not only waits to be rescued by a knight in shining armor, she is so incompetent that she needs to be rescued by three at once (the final sequence is charmingly overstuffed, involving two different men fist-fighting the killer simultaneously and a cop racing to the scene).

The final alloyed good element is that Deadly Intruder does have some fun with its kills. There isn't a lick of blood in this slasher movie, but the murders often involve semi-elaborate setups, which give them a smack of creativity that helps liven them up. And sometimes they're shockingly brutal, absolutely out of nowhere. One of the killer's first murders is so propulsively violent that it reminded me of Don't Answer the Phone. Which isn't something I particularly want to be reminded of, but at least it's trying something.

[SPOILER ALERT FOR THE REST OF THIS REVIEW]

The movie also has a fun little Psycho moment, because I was absolutely under the impression that we were going to be following Danny the whole time, and he's one of the first to die. 

But beyond that, it's mostly a slog. First and foremost, this movie has a Big Twist that you can see coming from a mile away: The drifter isn't the killer. "Bob" is actually Robert Harvey. If you're shocked by this, congratulations on watching your first-ever movie! Even if they hadn't just shortened the killer's name, the clues are loud and obvious. So it's frustrating that they wait until the final 10 minutes to tell you what's actually going on, making you wait and wait and wait for the movie to finally happen.

Plus, the drifter isn't a very flavorful red herring. We're forced to watch him wander around outside for minutes on end, not doing much of anything and not going anywhere in particular. The movie is at its most boring whenever he's onscreen, which is saying something, because the dinner party that forms the crux of the plot is composed of some of the most brutally uninteresting small talk ever committed to celluloid.

That said, even the bad parts of Deadly Intruder are at least a little weird. This includes the bizarre sequence where the drifter ties up Jessie and traps her in her own home. This is also pretty boring, because she has no survival skills and mostly just sits there and screams. But I can't say I've ever seen anything like the moment where he takes a tied-up Jessie out for a picnic and angrily calls dibs on the Coke. Or the post-killer-reveal moment where he simply unties Jessie and apologizes for kidnapping her, explaining that he just needed someone to talk to. 

Deadly Intruder isn't a hoot and a half. It's more like half a hoot. But I'll definitely take that over an insipid slog like When Dreams Come True.


Killer: Bob (Christopher Holder)
Final Girl: Jessie (Molly Cheek), through no fault of her own
Best Kill: Cathy's death is both a relief (she's really annoying) and a pretty cool sequence. The movie has already cut to a few insert shots of the car's engine fan whirring when the hood is popped on the side of the road, and Danny has just been killed, rudely refusing to fall on that spinning blade. Cathy, however, has her face forced into it by virtue of the car hood being shut on her head. A good time!
Sign of the Times: When Danny and Cathy are late for dinner because of car trouble, they can't just call Jessie and let her know.
Scariest Moment: Bob starts to freak out about the possibility of Jessie lying to him and dating someone behind his back. John and Amy calmly try to talk him down, not realizing how much danger they're in.
Weirdest Moment: Amy leaves the room to "go mash the potatoes," and like two seconds later, Jessie announces that dinner is ready. Girl, no it isn't!
Champion Dialogue: “Cooking without garlic is like making love without foreplay."
Body Count: 10
  1. Wayne is beaten to death with a board.
  2. Jim is conked on the head with a board and falls down the stairs.
  3. Woman is drowned in a kitchen sink.
  4. Mechanic is crushed under a car.
  5. Danny is axed in the back.
  6. Cathy has a car trunk closed on her, pushing her face into the engine fan.
  7. Lineman is stabbed in the face with a screwdriver.
  8. John has his head slammed through a TV.
  9. Amy is lift-strangled.
  10. Motorist is beaten to death with a poker.
TL;DR: Deadly Intruder is mildly entertaining but also mostly bad.
Rating: 5/10

Also sprach at 2 comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Thursday, October 1, 2026

Cardboard Science: Like A Prayer

Year: 1957
Director: Nathan Juran
Cast: William Hopper, Craig Stevens, Alix Talton
Run Time: 1 hour 19 minutes

Happy October, everybody! It's time for the annual Great Switcheroo with Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue! Somehow, this is our 13th year trading titles from our Census Bloodbath and Cardboard Science catalogues, so we decided to pull out all the stops. I have assigned him three 1980s slasher movies in the beloved genre of "holiday/special occasion" (which you'll hear from him about a bit closer to Halloween) and he has assigned me three 1950s sci-fi B-movies about killer arthropods.

We'll be starting off in the world of insects with 1957's The Deadly Mantis. This is a Nathan Juran joint, and that name should be familiar to anyone who has been keeping up with the Switcheroos over the years. Well, actually, maybe it won't be. Sometimes he was credited as Nathan Hertz. 

Anyway, the man is an Oscar winner (Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Black-and-White for How Green Was My Valley - how that mouthful of an award died out, I'll never know) who also directed the Ray Harryhausen classic 20 Million Miles to Earth, the charmingly daffy The Brain from Planet Arous, and the dorm room poster art mainstay Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (which is in contention for being my favorite Cardboard Science movie that doesn't star Godzilla).

I have a sneaking suspicion that the folks who made The Deadly Mantis were also somewhat familiar with Godzilla.

In The Deadly Mantis, a giant prehistoric praying mantis is unearthed from the ice near the North Pole thanks to seismic activity. It begins making a beeline (or, rather, a mantisline) southward to warmer climes, in the process destroying an outpost or two of the American military's northernmost radar fence. I hope you like the word "radar," because it is going to grace your ears several trillion times during this movie.

After an Eisensteinian first act, where the military as a collective is the de facto protagonist, the story finally finds some characters to hang its hat on after about 21 minutes. Dr. Nedrick Jackson (William Hopper of 20 Million Miles to Earth) is a D.C.-based paleontologist working at the Museum of Natural History who is called upon to lend his expertise when the as-yet unknown creature leaves behind a super-sized body part. Along for the ride is Marge Blaine (Alix Talton), a journalist for the "museum magazine" (they were just handing out press jobs like candy in the 1950s) who Girl Fridays herself onto the mission.

Your sign that a Cardboard Science movie is finally starting is when you see a shot of a woman in an impeccable jacket walking through a door.

Actually, let's swing back to the first act for a moment before we dive in deeper. You'll see people complaining because it's mostly a bunch of stock footage with voiceover explaining, say, the various radar lines that were being used to defend good American families during the Cold War. While that is undeniably true, there is magic to quite a bit of this sequence.

I particularly liked the opening shot, which is cheap, yes, but also elegant and downright cheeky. We open on a map, with the camera slowly zooming toward the United States (the center of all culture and storytelling) before - what's this, now? - gliding southward to show the Antarctic region. We sure aren't in Kansas anymore, buddy! Just by moving the camera around a map, The Deadly Mantis tells us that it knows what we expect from this kind of movie and that it wants to have a little fun with us. That feeling doesn't last beyond the first 20 minutes, but I'll take it where I can get it.

There's another cute little moment where the pompous narrator explains a bank of phones by saying things like "in five seconds, this phone can reach your local library; in four seconds, this phone can reach a state official in Oklahoma," and so on. However right when he gets to "in two seconds, this phone can reach the Pentagon," that phone rings. The way the narration interacts so smoothly with the scene and the way the scene unexpectedly begins, practically before he's done speaking, gives you that off-kilter sense of "oh shit, something important is happening right now."

Look, it's not like The Deadly Mantis is a work of genius or something, but there are a few moments where it's snappy and has a bit of flair. I'm a fan of flair! And after four movies, I can confidently say that I'm a fan of Juran.

Juran is The Man... tis.

The Deadly Mantis does lose most of its sparkle once the actual plot kicks in, though. It's very much a meat-and-potatoes giant monster movie. The plot plays out exactly like everything from The Giant Claw to Beginning of the End to Them!, with a few small, isolated attacks leaving behind clues about the creature, which eventually funnel into a big giant setpiece at the end.

The setpiece is pretty neat, sure.  It's fun to watch the mantis puppet zoom around Washington, D.C. and wreak havoc around the National Mall for a bit. Plus, the mantis effects only look super shitty in close-up, so it's nice to give the creature something to play with after a long stretch of seeing it in barren Arctic environments where it's difficult to appreciate its size.

A toast to scale models!

The monster movie portion of The Deadly Mantis is presumably the only reason anybody bought a ticket, so it should probably be a big problem that it's not very interesting. However, I found plenty else to be amused by in the final hour. There were even two big surprises.

First of all, it was genuinely astonishing to me that [spoiler alert, I guess] Marge and Dr. Jackson don't end up together. All of a sudden in the third act, she's trading shockingly steamy kisses with Colonel Joe Parkman (Craig Stevens), a character who I didn't even notice was in the movie until about two minutes before that.

The second surprise was even more fun. Most of these Cardboard Science movies are "horror movies" but really only because they contain monsters. The Deadly Mantis, on the other hand, seems genuinely interested in being part of the horror genre. This movie is chock full of jump scares, including a rare early use of the "hand grabbing your shoulder from behind" trope.

One of them even works pretty well! I'm talking about the scene where the mantis is seen creeping up on a building. When the camera cuts to the interior of the building, a door abruptly bangs open. This is all pretty rudimentary stuff, but given the extremely dormant state that mainstream horror was in throughout the 1950s, it's a huge win to have a movie even admit that horror exists.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

*Dr. Jackson informs his rapt military audience that "gentlemen, even birds have bony skeletons." Goodness me! Birds, you say? Whatever will they think of next?

The morality of the past, in the future!:

*During the scene where soldiers are being scrambled to respond to a mantis attack, we see a second or two of a Black soldier getting ready for takeoff, which might be the longest any Black person has been onscreen in all 13 years of this enterprise.
*There's some primo 1950s slang being tossed around in this movie. At one point, we learn that "everything is jake," which is a real relief if you ask me.
*In a montage of people watching the news in their living rooms, one of the kids has a flattop so crisp and gosh-darn flat that you could serve dinner on it.

Sensawunda:

*What struck me about The Deadly Mantis is that, in spite of its obsession with radar, nuclear testing and/or radiation have nothing to do either with how the mantis got so deadly or with how it got free from the ice. That's probably not a first, but it sure feels like one.

TL;DR: The Deadly Mantis is a mostly bland 1950s monster movie with a few surprises around the edges for those familiar with the genre.
Rating: 6/10

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture 
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)
2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)
2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)
2022: Tarantula (1955) The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
2023: Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957)
2024: Attack of the Puppet People (1958)
2025: X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963) The Spider (1958) The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
2026: The Deadly Mantis (1957) The Black Scorpion (1957) Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)

2023: Blood Rage (1987)
2024: Sleepaway Camp (1983)
2025: Superstition (1982) The Carpenter (1988) Visiting Hours (1982)
Also sprach at 2 comments:
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)