It’s Alive (1969) [REVIEW] | Farmers and Fishmen

Enough with the regular kind of crappy B-movies, let’s crank it up to uber shlock, with the misleadingly titled It’s Alive, not a Frankenstein style crap-fest like The Body Shop, it’s actually more a 50s style B-movie about a couple that runs out of gas in a remote rural town, and stumbles upon a crazy farmer, his imprisoned “wife” and his private zoo, which also includes a Gillman style monster.

I did watch it on Amazon Prime Video, which has the 2020 restored version, i can only imagine how worse the more common prints of the movie are. I truly can, it’s a cheap made for TV monster movie that seems to stem from a 50s script, but was clearly shot in late 60s /early 70s. Dat film grain, though.

Now, the question is: how bad does the monster look? Like the mermen with mouth-tentacles that look more like hot dogs from Horror At Party Beach?

Worse than Monster Of Piedras Blancas?

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The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) [REVIEW] | No Titans Allowed

Released by American International Pictures in a double bill with Cat Girl (not what you’re probably thinking), this Bert I. Gordon “cheese classic” also spawned a sequel, War Of The Colossal Beast, and it embodied – alongside The Incredible Shrinking Man – the 50s B-movie fascination for size alteration, leading to another popular and often parodied drive-in feature, Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman. Mr. B.I.G. himself would go back to this motif not only with the The Cyclops (previously released the same year), Attack Of The Puppet People and the aforementioned sequel to the movie , but even well into the 60s with Village Of The Giants, VERY loosely based off H.G. Wells’ Food Of The Gods, before he actually did a more…let’s say “proper” adaptation of the story. And then followed it with a sequel that had even less to do with the H.G. Wells classic book.

Nothing new, since this is actually an uncredited adaptation of the short sci-fi novel The Nth Man by Homer Eon Flint, a fairly unknown sci-fi author of the early 20^th centhury.

Like many B-movies from the 50s, it’s the radioactivity (discovered by Madame Curiè) that’s in the air for you and me. This time it’s Lt. Colonnel Glenn Manning (played by Glenn Langan), who gets hit by a plutonium bomb after rescuing a pilot that just crash-landed near the testing site.

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The Screaming Skull (1958) [REVIEW] | Sans Sense

Another classic stinker remembered today thanks in no small part to MST3K, you hardly can go lower than this independent cheesefest, which was originally released in the way most of this crap was back then, the old double-feature for the drive-in market, alongside either Earth VS The Spider or Terror From The Year 5000, both fittingly riffed by the Satellite Of Love’s crew of bots and men.

It’s technically based on the eponymous tale written by Francis Marion Crawford – which it’s quite good and can be found in The Complete Wandering Ghosts collection – itself based on a folk tale of a skull said to be that of a black slave, whose request for burial in his native country was denied following his death, and how it was subsequently followed by strange occurrences and unexplainable shrieking noises that emanated from the wooden box in which the skull was kept.

“Technically” as the movie doesn’t credit Crawford’s novel, and the plot follows a couple, Eric and Jenni, that moves to the house belonging to the husband’s late wife, Marion, which has been curated and cared for by Mickey, an odd gardener loyal to the late wife’s memory. Jenni witnesses some eerie events involving a skull around the house, and begins to think that she’s going insane..

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