Weird terror in small packages

Attack of the Puppet People
(aka "Six Inches Tall" and "The Amazing Puppet People")(1958)
Starring: John Hoyt, June Kenney and John Agar
Director: Bert I. Gordon
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

Mr. Franz (Hoyt), a demented puppeteer turned dollmaker invents a machine that will shrink living beings to the size of dolls. He uses it on anyone he likes who appears to be exiting his life and keeps them in his workship. When his secretary (Kenney) prepares to leave his employ to marry a likeable traveling salesman (Agar), the couple become his latest victims.


As the title of "Atack of the Puppet People" implies, the main storyline of this film involves a small group of shrunken men and women attempting to escape their captor, and, hopefully, return to their full size. It's an engaging movie--assuming you can buy into the whole "puppeteer shrinking people with mad science wonder-tech" aspect of the story--that is fast-paced and well-acted. Unfortunately, the script isn't quite up to snuff, and it features a number of plot threads that don't go anywhere and an ending that not only just sort of peters out but which leaves the fates of the majority of the puppet people a mystery.

(Even more annoying, for me at least, was that we never got to see the Jekyll/Hyde marionnette in action after all the talk that revolved around it. The scene with the tiny John Agar trashing the marionette was pretty cool, but I still would have liked to see the supposed transforming puppet actually tranform.)

Now they've gone too far! Nazis are turning sexy chicks into monsters!

She Demons (1958)
Starring: Irish McCalla, Tod Griffin, Victor Sen-Yung, and Rudolph Anders
Director: Richard Cunha
Rating: Three of Ten Stars

An obnoxious an rich girl (McCalla) and two of her daddy's employees (Griffin and Sen-Yung) are shipwrecked on an uncharted island. They must fight fight for survival against a Nazi mad scientist (Anders) who has harnessed the secret of perpetual motion and is using it and processes he perfected in the WW2 concentration camps to steal the beauty of native island girls (who like all native girls only want to dance) and transferring it to his wife, in the hopes of restoring her fire-ravaged body. The process reduces them to horribly mutated, violent monsters.... you know, She-Demons!

My summary gave away the element that almost earned this film a Four Rating. It's going along likea fairly standard, low-budget castaways-on-a-jungle-island-with-monsters-and-a-hot-babe movie when suddenly Nazis appear on the scene. And they're not just any Nazis... they're led by a mad scientist Nazi who, although his research is dedicated to restoring his wife's beauty (at the expense of a bevvy of hot bikini-babes) he immediately wants to do the horizontal mambo with Aryan beauty Irish McCalla.

That strange turn resulted in this film perhaps being the greatest combo of B-movie/exploitation movie/"grindhouse" movie mainstays ever made. (Uncharted island, jungle inhabited by strange creatures, a mad scientist transforming humans into beasts with his weird experiments, Nazis--sadistic, whip-weilding Nazis no less--a wife with a disfigured face who only Weird Science can restore, wise-crakcing colored sidekick, and exploding volcaones. All this movie needed was a flying saucer, nudity, and lesbian vampires, and it might have been been the Platonic ideal of crappy movies.)

Of course, it would need better acting and something resembling decent dialogue to truly be worth viewing. Only Rudolph Anders as mad scientist Colonel Osler was any good here, because he went waaay over the top with smariness and superior attitude. Irish McCalla did an okay job, because her character was so obnoxious that I wanted Osler to turn her into a She-Demon because it would shut her up.

On its own, "She-Demons" is not worth your time or money. It might be odd enough to be a secondary feature for a Bad Movie Night, but if you are going to get it, look for a DVD multipack that includes it and one or two movies you know are good. That way, this becomes a "bonus feature", and you've gotten your money's worth.

The overall blandness is spiced up by the exteme sadism of the bad guy

The Monster Maker (1944)
Starring: J. Carroll Naish, Tala Birell, Wanda McKay, Ralph Morgan and Terry Frost
Director: Sam Newfield
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

A mad scientist (Naish) goes to extreme measures to force the daughter (McKay) of a celebrated concert pianist (Morgan) to marry him.


"The Monster Maker" is a sadistic little horror film about a maniac with a talent for epidemiology, the young lady he wants to possess no matter what, and her father that he infects with a horrible disease to make it happen.

The movie is a little on the slow side, the acting is uniformly bland and the camera work is even more so. However, the absolute and pure insane evil that is represented by J. Caroll Naish's character of Dr. Markoff will make you stick with the film. His plan to force the lovely Patricia to marry him can't possibly work, but he proceeds with the unwavering certainty that only a complete lunatic would display... and the film gets increasingly sadistic toward its various characters as it unfolds.

Dr. Markoff may well be one of the most evil mad scientists of the first decade of horror cinema, not to mention one of the craziest. (I can't comment on the full reason why I say he's the evilest and craziest as it ruins one of the film's shocking revelations, but take my word for it: You haven't seen the final word in an evil mad scientist until you've seen "The Monster Maker".

The film is also noteworthy if you're interested in following the trail of the obviously fake gorillas that were so common(and possibly even proscribed by some sort of cinematic code) among low-budget film studios in the 1940s. Perhaps it was the same fake gorilla? It shows up again here and it's just as unintentionally hilarious as every other time it shows up.

(Has anyone tried to catalogue the number of times these fake gorillas showed up during the 1940s? If not, there might be an article in that idea....)

"The Monster Maker" is worth checking out if you're into mad scientists and/or fake gorilla suits. I highly recommend the version available from Alpha Video as the DVD transfer was made from a virtually prestine print of the film. Click here to read more about, or to order a copy, it at Amazon.com. (There are some minor scratches, but it's in far better shape than what is typical for films from long-bankrupt minor studios like PRC.)

'The Mad Monster' isn't mad enough to bother with

The Mad Monster (1942)
Starring: George Zucco, Johnny Downs, Glenn Strange, and Anne Nagel
Director: Sam Newfield
Rating: Three of Ten Stars

After being mocked by his collegues and pilloried in the press for his outlandish theories, Dr. Lorenzo Cameron (Zucco) retreats to an isolated estate to continue his experiments. Unfortunately, Cameron's theories--that if he injects a serum created from wolf's blood into a human, that human will turn into a violent wolfman--were workable, and he he uses them to turn his simple-minded gardener (Strange) into a tool of revenge against those who destroyed his career.


"The Mad Monster" has one of the strongest openings of the many old-time mad scientist movies that I've seen. The complete and utter madness of Cameron is established effectively as he discusses his scientific discoveries in an increasingly heated fashion with four men who appear and dissapear from chairs around the table he is at. It's a scene that's well-written, well-staged, and well-acted.

Unfortunately, everything that follows is badly written, poorly staged (with the exception of where the wolfman kidnaps and kills a little girl (!)), and over-acted--even George Zucco who often hammed it up in films like, this is so far over the top that one can't help but groan at the performance. (Only Anne Nagel, who plays Cameron's daughter, doesn't embarrass herself... but that might be due to the fact that she her role really doesn't require much in the way of acting from her.)

The final blow to this movie is the wolfman make-up, as the creature looks more like a beatnik or a hippie than a menacing monster. Rediculous is too mild a term to describe what it looks like.

While "The Mad Monster" is worth seeing by fans of the "mad scientist on a rampage" horror subgenre for its opening scene, there really isn't enough here to make it worth seeking out on its own. However, it's included in a number of those low-cost DVD multi-packs, and if there are other movies in a set that interest you, then this makes for a nice bonus.

A cautionary tale about mixing up your meds....

The Vampire (aka "Mark of the Vampire") (1957)
Starring: John Beal, Kenneth Tobey, Lydia Reed, Coleen Gray, Dabbs Greer, and James Griffith
Director: Paul Landres
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

A kindhearted small-town doctor and single father (Beal) accidentally takes an experimental drug in place of his migraine medicine. Each night around 11pm, he now transforms into a hideous manbeast whose bite infects victims with a virus that causes the cells in their bodies to disintegrate. Will he find a way to stop the transformations before he attacks and kills his pretty nurse (Gray) or, worse, his little daughter (Reed)?

"The Vampire" is a somewhat misleading title. There really aren't any vampires in the film, and the story draws more from "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" than from any vampire legends.

That aside, this is a neat little flick where horror meets mad science. John Beal plays a very sympathetic main character who is as much a victim as the people he attacks--and unlike many other movie characters in his stead, he actually tries to take action to stop himself but fate or disbelief on the part of those he asks for help always steps in to keep the movie going until it's inevitable conclusion.

Although there are few moments of horror in the film, it does manage to deliver many tense moments. It is also structured in such a way that I was starting to wonder if the film would take the unusual step for movies from this period of having the precocious young daughter of our hero/monster (played with better-than-average skill for a child actor) be attacked or even maimed. It film doesn't go down that road, but it's an illustration of the how well the script is put together that I even thought it might. (Actually, this is one of those rare movies that could do with a remake. What if Beal had bitten his daughter or the nurse but not killed them? The race to swiftly develop a cure before their bodies start to break down would have made for a great end to the film.)

"The Vampire" is one of those films that can feed the imagination if you're in the right (twisted) frame of mine, and that makes it worth seeking out. Entirely too few movies do that.

Another cancer cure worse than the disease....

Atom Age Vampire (1960) 

Starring: Alberto Lupo and Susan Loret 

Director: Anton Giulio Majano 

Rating: Three of Ten Stars 

 Professor Levin (Lupo) has developes a cure for cancer that also regenerates cells to remove scar tissue. Unfortunately, the effect is short-term, and he has not yet found a way to quickly make more of his wonder drug. So, in order to keep a one-time horribly disfigured ex-dancer (Loret) whom he helped from reverting to her former state, he drinks another of his inventions and turns into a hideous, super-strong killer and runs around ripping glands out of young women and implanting them in the stripper as a stop-gap measure.

 

I'm not sure where the vampires enter into "Atom Age Vampire" as this weak Italian mad scientist movie is more of a "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" tale... just it's Dr. Hyde and Mr. Hyde, as Levin is a pretty repulsive character even before he starts downing the Mad Science Potion. 

 This movie is a nice addition to a Bad Movie Night line-up, but otherwise isn't really worth your time.