THE CYCLOPS

d. Bert I. Gordon (1957)

A group of pushy Americans looking for a lost pilot crash land in a mysterious Mexican valley. The trip has been organised by the pilot's girlfriend who, even after three years, can't accept that he is dead. On the plus side, the valley is filled with million of dollars of raw uranium; on the down side, it's inhabited by a  menagerie of enormous creatures, many times their normal size: lizards, insects, rats, eagles, snakes and, most memorably, a twenty five foot tall nappy wearing man beast with one eye, terrible teeth and a partially melted face. Is he friendly? Not so much. Could he conceivably hold the secret to the mystery of the missing man? I wonder... 

I particularly like the scenes of the Cyclops menacing people. Lacking depth perception, he rather struggles to grab them, so we're just left with a poorly back projected hairy hand jabbing pointlessly at the actors (at one point accidentally tearing away the backdrop). The cast, which includes Lon Chaney, Jr. as a loveable dirtbag, don't seem to quite know what they are reacting to and their blank, confused faces combine with poorly executed special effects to provide a very silly 64 minutes.

The Cyclops, who (of course, it's so obvious now!) turns out to be the missing pilot, ends up being speared in his remaining eye and left to die. It's rather cruel: he didn't ask to be marooned in that radiation choked valley and get mutated into a horrible giant, after all. His once devoted girlfriend, having quickly realised the drawbacks of being involved with an ugly, angry monster, is in the arms of another man before her massive ex-beau has even fallen over and died.    

Director, writer and producer Bert I. Gordon ('Mr. B.I.G') obviously liked the concept (and the make up) revisiting it in both The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) and its sequel War Of The Colossal Beast (1958), although in these films the mutation is the result of plutonium bomb testing.    

THE BRAIN EATERS

d. Bruno VeSota (1958)

'A few weeks ago, Riverdale, Illinois was just another small, quiet town. But on that Saturday just after midnight, a living nightmare began'.

A 200 million year old race of hungry neon leeches land on on Earth with the idea that they are going to plug themselves in to the necks of human beings, operate them like mad puppets until they finish eating their brains, and then move on until the supply is extinguished. You can see what's in it for the leeches, but the Midwest natives are unconvinced, so eventually use science, a harpoon gun and several lives to zap the little bleeders into oblivion.

Not much happens, to be honest, but it's relatively well made and the alien's ship, a gleaming metallic cone of unknown material filled with a myriad of concentric tunnels, is interesting, as is the late appearance of the human manifestation of the malevolent hirundea, happily played by our old friend Leonard Nemoy (that's how it's spelled on the credits), wearing a silly Father Christmas beard to make him look older and wiser, his familiar features further obscured by odd lighting and a vaseline smeared lens. It's good to sort of see him.

THE MUMMY'S GHOST

d. Reginald Le Borg (1944)

‘If the Mummy didn’t make these tracks, I’ll eat ‘em’

It’s shit being a Mummy.  Dead, but not dead, wrapped in putrid rags that reek of your own decay. One eyed, one armed, one foot dragging awkwardly behind. You can’t speak, you can’t reason and, with no will of your own, you are wide open to become the shuffling slave of any unscrupulous person who knows the evocations and boils the right number of Tana leaves during a full moon.  Your heart, that putrefying organ, is filled with ancient spores and moss and dirt but, cruelly, still functions just well enough for you to continue to suffer the acute pain of a centuries dead lost love. 

And what do you do when you’re not needed to kill, to kidnap, to terrorise, to steal artefacts? Where do you go, what space do you inhabit? Do you live under a bridge, like a bandage wreathed troll? Or do you just sit in a shed or a cave or in the heart of the woods and wait? After all, waiting is second nature to you – actually, its first nature, the thing that you are most familiar with after thousands of years of stasis.  

Then, when you find that your beloved Princess Ananka has been reincarnated, how do you plight your troth? You lumber up to the poor girl and scare her into unconsciousness, terrify her to the extent that a grey streak spontaneously appears in her hair: she isn't pleased to see you, and that feeling of deathless love over the millennia is most definitely not mutual. 

So, you scoop up her inert body and drag her off to the river like so much laundry, pursued by an angry mob and a scrappy little dog who hates your dusty guts. As you disappear into the muddy water, dragging your (now inexplicably aged) reincarnated Princess with you, what do you think you’ll find down there? Peace? Contentment? Rest? These things are not available to you. They never will be. You'll be back.

It’s shit being a Mummy.   

ATONAL CINEMA FOR ZOMBIES

I think one of the most influential books that I ever read was The Psychotronic Encyclopedia Of Film by Michael Weldon: hundreds of capsule reviews of films that I never ever thought I'd see, most of which are now available at the press of a few keys and a couple of clicks. 

Weldon's book didn't need a lot of pictures, and it predated the readily accessible internet and its cavalcade of hyperlinks, .gifs and embedded video clips, so I'm not going to bother with them either. If you're reading this then you are almost certainly computer literate enough to find all that for yourself, which sounds a bit stroppy but isn't intended to be.  

I reserve the right to write about what I want here, but can confirm the focus will mainly be strange films from, say, 1930s-odd to 1970s-ish, most of which will be psychotronic, i.e. bizarre, obscure, wonderful.