BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER

d. Edgar G. Ulmer (1960)

A super cheap sci fi b-movie made on an abandoned air base in just ten days, Beyond The Time Barrier isn't exactly 'the most terrifying film ever made'*, but it is a tiny triumph over adversity, a testament to the ingenuity, imagination and determination of its director, Edgar G. Ulmer - and his family, who worked on the production in various roles.

When a USAF test pilot breaks the sound barrier and the time barrier in a new plane, he finds himself projected forward to the year 2024. Things are fairly grim in the future as a space plague has split mankind into two groups: murderous bald mutants, and deaf mute 'survivors' who have become sterile. The only fertile woman on the planet is wheeled out to mate with the test pilot and, as she's rather attractive, he's not too put out, although another time traveller, a bloody Russian, is about to put a mighty spoke in the works...

Ulmer started his film career as a set designer and, no matter how cheap his films are, they always have a very definite look. Here, the survivors live underground in a sort of geodesic pyramid. From the outside it's clearly a drawing but, inside, it is nicely realised, halfway between a bomb shelter and a holiday camp, made up of dozens of interlocking triangular panels. In a nice touch, Ulmer doesn't just fade the scenes in the pyramid out, but uses triangular ellipses to move from place to place. It's  a small but important point: Ulmer isn't just here to make pointless trash: he has a vision, and he manages to bring it to screen on a shoestring. Regardless of the results, I think that's quite an achievement.   

* The trailer makes quite a lot of unsubstantiated claims. 

MAN BEAST

d. Jerry Warren (1956)

My expectations were low for this film, so I was pleasantly surprised to find myself watching lots of (generally well filmed) footage of a small group of people traipsing through snow and climbing mountains hunting for the Abominable Snowman, especially as, every now and again, a scruffy looking Yeti would appear from behind a rock or from a hole in the ice to watch their progress and shake his manky head at the folly of it all. Then, towards the end of the film, when a sinister mountain guide ripped open his silk chemise to reveal a coarsely matted white hairy chest, declaiming that he was part Yeti himself, I choked on my can of Lilt and ascended into psychotronic heaven powered by the sheer silly brilliance of it all.  

It seems that the Yeti are simultaneously at several stages of evolution. Some look like albino gorillas with skulls for faces (they mainly do the heavy work); some are more man than beast, facilitated by a breeding programme with kidnapped local women. The sinister mountain guide is particularly excited about getting his hands on the sole female in the expedition, an American woman, as he believes that their offspring would perhaps skip two generations of development, maybe putting a Yeti in the White House by the year 2,000.

Triple threat film maker Jerry Warren is often criticised for the sheer shoddiness of much of his output, but, on this evidence, he could also put something half way decent together when he wanted to. Man Beast is cheap, yes, but it is also fun, engaging, surprising and the mountain footage is nicely done. Sure, it's no La Regle du jeu, but then I've always thought the highly rated French classic conspicuously lacking in Yeti action.       

NIGHT OF THE LEPUS

d. William F. Claxton (1972)

Everybody knows that rabbits aren't scary or threatening, no matter how massive they are or how much ketchup you smear around their mouths and adorable twitching noses.This simple fact, seemingly ignored by all involved in this farcical production, completely destroys any scintilla of authenticity from the opening shot onwards. After 90 minutes, as we watch hundreds upon hundreds of giant rabbits shot to bits and electrocuted, we don't feel any relief that a scruffy piece of American desert and a few hillbillies have been saved, we just feel desperately sad for the slaughter and a little bit dirty, like Sir Stanley Baker at the end of Zulu.

The overgrown 'lepus' haven't been created by 'bad' science in this instance - their rapid growth, rampant aggression and unexpected liking for human meat is actually the result of humane, experimental work to inhibit their breeding and save them from a total cull. Put that in your irony pipe and puff it, PETA. The test tube work is done by an idealistic 'young couple' Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh (both in their mid forties but looking much older) but is inadvertently compromised by their young daughter, who can't resist playing with the fluffy specimens and accidentally mixes up the test subjects - with preposterous results.  

This small but pivotal role was originally earmarked for the teenage Jamie Lee Curtis, until Mum Janet vetoed it: she didn't want her little girl anywhere near a horror film.

Anyway, if you do have a rabbit, go and stroke it. Other pets / euphemisms may very well apply.  

INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS

d. Denis Sanders (1973) 

For a long while, Invasion Of The Bee Girls requires some perseverance. A patchy story about a series of unexplained deaths in a small town with a large biological research centre, the key point of interest is that the victims are exclusively men, specifically middle aged scientists, most of whom have some form of ingenious and elaborate comb across. Their sudden demise is attributed to being (using the 70s vernacular) 'balled' to death. Are their murders linked to the top secret work they are doing? And isn't the town (brilliantly, called Peckham) notorious for being a swinger's paradise? And why do all the women in town wear such big sunglasses?* 

After an hour, however, there is an extraordinary sequence in which a group of very short white coated women perform a strange procedure on a naked, half conscious lady stood in front of a Buckminster Fuller-style geodesic dome made of electrical cable. They bombard her with radiation, smear her in latex, then lock her away in a compartment filled with bees, which cover her entirely. After this, they peel off the plastic and flash her with a heat ray. The soft light and warmth of the light unlocks something sensual within her - and does the same for the other women in the lab - and there is much wistful self-fondling. One lesbian kiss later and the subject's eyes turn completely black. She is now a bee girl. Her mission: to copulate an ugly old scientist to death. The reason: less clear cut, but it has to do with chauvinistic and irresponsible experiments causing female sterility or something. 

When the film was released on video in the UK it was re-titled 'Graveyard Tramps', which only makes me think of cider and public urination. I'm not quite sure why, but I seem to watch this film three or four times a year. It's become some sort of 'go to' film for a recurring mood: slightly pissed off, at a loose end, nowhere near ready for bed, in need of something slightly incomprehensible and full of weird. It's never let me down yet.   

I'd like to write a book about it one day. But just a short one. Send money and crayons.

* The credits read 'Bee Come Beautiful Sunglasses by Foster Grant'.

THE BEES

d. Alfredo Zacarias (1978)

'You have to listen to what the bees have to say!'

Mankind has a contradictory attitude towards bees, being both completely dependent on them for the continuation of human life on this planet, and simultaneously determined on eradicating them completely in pursuit of short term profit. As a child, I was once chased by a swarm of bees and stung over dozen times, but I don't hold a grudge: they were just doing their job and, after some brief discomfort, I was perfectly fine, although somewhat reluctant to cross them again.

The Bees is a brilliant, chaotic film. Totally cobbled together, it's difficult to know what is more awkward, the mismatched stock footage of plane and helicopter crashes and social panic (at one point, despite the film being set in the modern day and in Mexico and USA, we see obviously British people from the 1960s running past the Ilford Curzon) or  the dodgy optical effects, including what looks like green soot smeared on the negative to represent huge clouds of deadly bees. Every scene is scored with unsuitable music: people die in agony accompanied by ragtime piano, or atonal jazz. There's an appearance from ex-president Gerald Ford (in news footage) and then president Jimmy Carter (played by an impersonator). The elderly John Carradine does a silly German accent, and is taken out by hitmen. 

The Bees in question are imbued with an almost mystical quality, directed from a glowing, throbbing mega-hive in a cave. The upshot is that the bees aren't just killing people because they can, but because they are the vanguard of the defence of mother nature. Sick of having her natural resources used and abused by man, she has sent '20 trillion' bees to teach them a lesson, culminating in a swarm of bees holding the United Nations to ransom. 

Stars John Saxon and Angel Tompkins do the only thing they can and enjoy themselves, providing the film with a basic core of grace, good nature and fun. It's a film that is hilariously funny, not in a sneering way, but just because it is silly and ridiculous and doesn't take itself at all seriously. The funniest thing of all is that Paramount paid the producers a million dollars not to release the film before their own big budget take on the theme, The Swarm. They needn't have bothered, The Swarm was a massive flop, notable only for Michael Caine's immortal words (read aloud, using 'the voice'): 'I never dreamed it would turn out to be the bees. They've always been our friends'. 

DEMENTIA 13

d. Francis Ford Coppola (1963)

A rather murky tale of intrigue and murder set in Ireland, the plot revolves around that most baleful of storylines, the death of a child and the terrible, dysfunctional, psychotic effect it has on an already eccentric (and not Irish in the slightest) family.

The young Francis Coppola wrote and directed the film, the culmination of a short apprenticeship with producer and director Roger Corman that had seen him doing anything and everything from editing, dubbing and script writing to the washing up and driving. Corman worked his interns pretty hard, but he was also remarkably astute about talent and very generous with opportunities. When 'The Young Racers' concluded under budget and ahead of schedule, Corman decided to maximise the saving by giving Coppola forty grand, nine days and Samuel Beckett's favourite actor* to make his very own film - as long as it was a bit like Psycho**.

The script (written more or less overnight) is, perhaps not unexpectedly, a little uneven, and the direction is occasionally self-conscious but, overall, it's an impressive achievement, not least because of the atmosphere of sustained dread it creates and some nicely realised underwater shots. There's also a short monologue about a recurring nightmare and incipient madness that makes you stop everything that you're doing to listen to it, including breathing.

* I am referring, of course, to the amazing Patrick Magee, an actor with a sinister voice somewhere between a purr and a croak and an extraordinary intensity. I was going to describe him as immortal, but he died in 1982, and I thought somebody might write in.

** The opportunity turned out to be a parting gift: Corman hated the film, and Coppola went his own way after the test screening.

THE MAN FROM PLANET X

d. Edgar G. Ulmer (1951) 

An interesting attempt at making a film about an alien invasion on a tiny budget and with only a few painted sets and some scale models to help set the scene, The Man From Planet X is notable for two things: it's supposed location, and the X Man himself, who is an amazing and surprising creation.

The film is supposedly set on the 'Scotch' island of Bury, a place of fog and moors and fishermen with stick on sideburns and a variety of accents. Bury will be the closest point on Earth when the newly discovered Planet X's orbit brings it close to our world for the first time. As such, some scientists and a journalist have gathered there to more closely observe the arrival of X, little realising that the mysterious sphere is populated, and that the inhabitants are mainly interested in decamping from their place to ours.

Which brings us to the X Man, the 'fantastic gnome': a small, rather feeble humanoid in a cumbersome space suit that is reminiscent of a deep sea diving outfit. The alien's face resembles crude, ancient figurative art, with stretched and elongated features, something like Humpty Dumpty's face etched onto sandstone. It's both creepy and rather sad, especially as the X Man seems permanently terrified. It takes a little spark of genius to imagine a life form that is recognisably a 'person' but also completely alien: the really clever part is that the X man appears to be made out of geological rather than biological material.       

We learn that Planet X is icing over, and will soon be unable to support life. The funny faced envoy is not unreasonable in the first instance but, once he's been beaten up and the military have been called in he gets a lot more aggressive, using a mind control ray to get the help he needs from the locals to trigger a full scale invasion.

Mankind triumphs in the end, of course. The army blow the X Man and his rocket to bits and so Planet X swings out of orbit without making contact, disappearing out into the farthest reaches of space on a trajectory of frozen doom. Hurrah, we should all be very proud of ourselves.  

CURSE OF THE UNDEAD

d. Edward Dein (1959)

An uneven horror western, Curse Of The Undead isn't completely successful but it does come up with the brilliant idea of a vampire working as a hired gun, a black clad killer who isn't particularly quick on the draw because he doesn't have to be: you can shoot him all you like with ordinary bullets, it doesn't make a scrap of difference.

The vampire himself (played by Australian character actor Michael Pate) is almost sympathetic and, in his attacks on the necks of the local girls, regretful and tender. It seems that, some twenty years previously, he found out that his new wife had been sleeping with his brother, so he stabbed the brother to death before killing himself. Via a route that is not particularly well signposted, he then came back as a vampire and few soft necks have been safe since. To his credit, he hates what he has become, shouting 'do you think I wanted this?' as he kills. It's not all nibbling virgins and long lie ins, you know.   

Somehow the vampire ends up in a love triangle with a beautiful local land owner called Dolores and her pompous and overbearing preacher boyfriend (Eric Fleming*) and, as this is cowboy times, it can only end in a shoot out. Although you're rooting for the vampire, the preacher prevails, killing his undead rival with a holy bullet, a slug capped with a sliver of thorn from the site of the crucifixion. As the vampire's body fades away into nothingness, Dolores looks on in horror, knowing that this means she will now have to marry the boring, bossy Vicar and spend the rest of her life hearing about how he saved her life . Oh well, Dolores does mean 'sorrows', after all...

* I don't like Fleming's character in this film, but I always feel a bit sorry for the actor himself. In 1966, he was making a film in the Amazon when his boat overturned and he was eaten by piranhas. 

SATAN'S CHILDREN

d. Joe Wiezycki (1975)

Rape revenge films are always mean and tawdry: no matter how satisfying the revenge element is, there always has to be a disturbing attack to set up the story. Here, there's a slight twist on standard exploitation mores: the victim is a teenage boy, a runaway from an intolerable home life who meets an older guy who he hopes will be a friend and mentor but instead turns out to be  the scumbag leader of a gang of scumbag abusers. The scumbags all take a turn with the unfortunate youngster then dump his ripped and torn body in the middle of nowhere, where he is discovered, semi-conscious, by a group of satanists. How lucky can one boy be?

The satanists are all young, hippy-ish and in the thrall of a super louche smoothie called Simon, who gives orders in a slow, quiet voice whilst fiddling with his Zapata moustache. He talks of The Master as if he were the area manager. It's a ridiculously tough group – disciplinary infractions are punished by execution by hanging or, if they're being generous, by burying you up to your neck in sand and covering your hair in syrup to attract the ants.

Strangely for an unconventional cult of sexual freedom and social anarchy they are dead set against homosexuality to the extent that poor Bobby, even as a rape victim, is treated with suspicion and labelled a 'loser' who was 'weak' enough to 'let' himself be abused.

The only way Bobby can prove himself is in the bloodiest terms possible. He escapes, pushes two of the pursuing Satanists into quicksand (actually a hole filled with plaster of paris and washing up liquid), goes home, hits his mean Dad over the head with a bottle and bundles his wicked stepsister into the boot of his car before finding and shooting his attackers and cutting off their heads and putting them in a bag which he presents to Simon as proof of his sincerity, proving himself as a ‘winner’: a bright eyed boy with a bright arsed future. His stepsister (who is more unpleasant than plain evil) is handed over to the group as a kind of cult-warming present, to be tortured and, eventually, crucified.

It’s a remarkable film, really, despite clear technical limitations: the sound often overlaps or gets suddenly cut off; special effects and pyrotechnics are on show; several key scenes lose dramatic intensity by simply being too dark. The cast is made up entirely of students, which occasionally shows, but actually helps create a terrifying vision of a post-Manson USA where disaffected youths are being corrupted, abused, degraded and turned to the dark side all across the country without anyone knowing about it.

BABY FACE NELSON

d. Don Siegel (1957)

Americans love outlaws, and cinema, so it's not surprising that most notable American criminals have been commemorated on film. Yet these notorious people, whether they are Jesse James or John Dillinger, Butch and Sundance or Bonnie and Clyde, have something else in common besides celluloid immortality: they're all scum bags. Despite the glamour and mythology that springs up around them, outlaws are very rarely Robin Hood style philanthropists, or even oppressed people striking a blow against the system. Instead they are usually violent criminals, ruthless, amoral people who steal and kill and spread misery and fear: fascinating but not exactly admirable. 

Take Lester Gillis aka Baby Face Nelson, as played here by Mickey Rooney. This character has but one redeeming feature, the love of a beautiful woman (Carolyn Jones). By the end of the film, even she is becoming sickened by his blood lust and, it would seem, his death wish. Nelson is a monster, no-one is safe around him and no matter how much money he steals, how many people he kills, he never stops, he can't stop. The real Nelson died after being shot seventeen times. Even then he managed to make it home and die in his bed, a defiant final 'fuck you' to the world. Here, his wife administers the coup de grace in a graveyard after he is fatally wounded, which is a more obviously dramatic finale, but a less satisfying one.

Director for hire Don Siegel doesn't particularly distinguish himself here, but he keeps everything moving. Outlaws life stories always seem to have a kind of fatal momentum, anyway, a short, quick charge to death or imprisonment. Rooney is far too old to play Nelson (Nelson was dead at 25, Rooney is pushing 40) but has the right look and the right stature (throughout Nelson is referred to as 'shrimp' or, ironically, 'the big man' - he doesn't like it). His performance has two gears, a sort of closed off auto pilot that allows him to function on a day to day basis, and a murderous, explosive anger that drives him onwards. This uncontrollable ire is the focus of one of Siegel's few directorial flourishes, a big close up on Nelson's face as he swears revenge, his right eye twitching involuntarily with rage.       

WOMEN IN BONDAGE

d. Steve Sekely (1943)

Cheap but potent propaganda, Women In Bondage takes the unusual step of showing Nazi Germany on the home front, and from the perspective of the women caught up in the mad world of Hitler and his murderous stooges. 

All women must join a paramilitary organisation, for instance, and spend their time marching, identifying enemy planes and informing on their friends, colleagues, neighbours and anyone else who dares question the Fuhrer. On their spare evenings, the girls are expected to be sexually promiscuous, particularly with soldiers, doing their bit to keep the master race well stocked. Then there are the intrusive medical examinations, and the obsession with Aryan purity (one girl is unable to marry her SS man boyfriend because she fails an eye test), as well as other sundry surprises that the insanely inhuman and unsentimental logic of the Reich throws up (a woman's husband returns from the Russian Front a hero but an impotent invalid; she is officially instructed to get pregnant by his brother instead). 

It's occasionally strong stuff, and is particularly successful in the way that it presents the regime (quite realistically) as a sick but ultimately rather banal bureaucracy that, like all totalitarian states, can only function by the constant exertion of force, a mountain of paperwork and a willing workforce of goon-like enforcers. 

Please note that the title refers to bondage in the sense of serfdom or slavery, not the act of tying or binding for sexual pleasure. Although there is a bit of that, and some whipping.   

BLACK SAMSON

d. Charles Bail (1974)

I love Blaxploitation films because they generally make absolutely no apologies and they cut straight to the core of popular cinema. These are films filled with sex, action and wish fulfillment and packed with entertainment. The protagonists are not only larger than life but they are big and bold enough to bust out of their societal cage: impervious to pain, irresistible to the opposite sex, ineffably cool, unbelievably tough, they are righteous dudes and bitches, sticking it to The Man, whoever and wherever The Man might be.

Samson is one of these righteous dudes. He is a big mahogany hewn motherfucker who keeps his neighbourhood tight, running it like a benign dictator, although he’s not afraid to hand out a couple of taps with his ceremonial twatting stick if he needs to. He’s down on drugs and crime, and, through his popular bar at the hub of the community, he provides his subjects with beer, topless go-go dancing and the sad novelty of his pet lion, perhaps the biggest victim of Samson’s pre-eminence. The lion looks drugged up and utterly miserable, laid on the bar in a torpor, or a stupor, his eyes dim and dead.

The lion, along with a wardrobe of garish dashikis and a gold topped staff, is clearly part of Samson’s shtick, his chains of office. As a fiend for accuracy this jarred with me, as the original Samson that they are clearly alluding to didn’t even like lions, instead tearing one apart with his bare hands and leaving its corpse to rot. When he passed by again a few days later, a swarm of bees had built a hive in its decaying stomach, prompting the maxim ‘from the strong came forth the sweet’: the phrase, and a rendition of the dead lion and the live bees, still appear on Lyle’s Golden Syrup tins today. Who says that blogs can’t be educational?

Into this relatively balanced and peaceful environment comes the Mafia, in the person of a ambitious, young-ish mobster played by William Smith – a man who has appeared in over three hundred films, none of them much good. His villain is a real master class in scumbaggery, an abuser of women, a bully, a creep and wearer of loud checked trousers. This cracker piece of pockmarked shit wants to take over Samson’s patch and arrogantly thinks it will be easy, an assumption he will live to regret - but not for long.     

The film culminates in a mad battle where the locals gather on roofs to hurl old fridges and air conditioners at the mobsters while being shot in the face and falling to their deaths. It’s carnage. When the battle is won, Samson, curiously absent during the fighting, strides into the fray like a General, surveying the death and destruction with a damp but undamaged eye, nodding sagely at the mayhem he has presided over. To his credit, and most unlike a general, he tears his shirt off, puts his huge dukes up and, after a bruising and protracted scrap, beats the obnoxious and unrepentant Smith to death.

Threat neutralised, villain dispatched, equilibrium is restored in Samsonville, and the topless go go dancing begins again, perhaps with even more abandon. It’s nice to know who’s in charge. For some, anyway, the lion couldn’t give a monkeys. 

THE GIANT CLAW

d. Fred F. Sears (1957)

The Giant Claw is surprisingly considered for a film about a massive killer bird from outer space which looks like a cross between a new born vulture and Rod Hull's Emu. The enormous (and enormously goofy looking) winged monster is, in fact, from a galaxy many millions of light years away, a galaxy made of anti-matter. As such, the Giant Claw (for the record, it has several giant claws) is impervious to our weapons and so flaps around the world quite freely, destroying planes and trains and cars as if they were simply slightly shabby scale models, knocking the tops off buildings and chomping down pedestrians and parachutists like screaming fleshy tic tacs.  

It takes a lot of collateral damage and a great deal of convoluted sort of science chat before the forces of humanity are able to blast the creature out of the skies for good, although, before hand, and to their great satisfaction, they do manage to find its nest and scramble its huge solitary egg with a couple of sniper rifles.

This film went by so quickly it almost felt like a dream, just not as realistic. It works very well on its own terms and the super-sized death turkey with its mohican hair-do (or is it a wind blown comb across?) and tombstone teeth is a once seen, never forgotten creation.

BLOOD FREAK

d. Brad F. Grinter (1972)

We've all seen cautionary tales about the dangers of drug consumption, and those of us who like our films psychotronic will have seen our fair share of movies about the transformative powers of mad and unsanctioned science. Blood Freak manages to combine these two hot topics to present us with the far out story of a narcotics fiend who turns into a turkey.

Hunky Herschell is just back from Vietnam, with only a badly burned arm and a dope habit to show for his tour of duty. While riding from town to town on his chopper, he meets up with Angel, a Bible spouting dolly bird who, despite her obvious moral rectitude, takes him to a hippy drug party and introduces him to her wilder and more switched on sister, Ann. Sultry Ann sets her cap at the upright, uptight Herschell, and conspires with her sleazy drug dealer to get her target to smoke an instantly addictive joint, after which he falls into bed with her.

Herschell gets a job at the local poultry farm where, for extra cash, he chows down on turkey that has been illegally experimented upon. Soon afterwards he has a seizure and, when he wakes up, he is surprised to find (as are we) that he has the big, gnarled head of a turkey cock and major collywobbles from drug comedown. Actual turkey, cold turkey: it’s a very clever metaphor. Doubly damned, he now creeps about grabbing addicts and slitting their throats, drinking their dope rich blood like coca cola while his supposedly dead victims cough and splutter as the strawberry syrup goes into their eyes and up their noses. 

This madness is interspersed with sardonic commentary from director, Brad F. Grinter, a permanently smoking grizzled guy who has clearly lived hard and well and reads his erudite words from an offscreen piece of paper, perhaps due to short term memory loss. Grinter concludes this outrageous story by saying that it is 'partly based on fact, partly based on probability', clearly bullshit. In the end analysis, though, this is a film about a vampire turkey that manages to entertain without a knowing nod, a wink or an arched eyebrow, so it's pretty much beyond normal criticism as far as I'm concerned. 

OCTAMAN

d. Harry Essex (1971)

Octaman isn't a very good film in any respect, but it has a massive amount of chutzpah, not least in its ambition to make a feature length movie with virtually no budget and hardly any script. Half of what money there was must have gone on two past their best name actors: former Gulliver, Sinbad and Jack the Giant Killer, Kerwin Matthews, and Italian erstwhile ingenue Pier Angeli, who would accidentally overdose on barbiturates shortly after the production wrapped (I say ‘accidentally’, but perhaps she was trying to avoid attending the premiere).

The rest of the cash was obviously spent on the Octaman rubber suit, because we see it from every angle - and it looks pretty good: two legs, six tentacles and a dome shaped head, fiery red eyes and a hideous toothy hole for a mouth, a perennially open 'o' that looks a bit like Paul McCartney's mouth, or a cats arse.  We don’t see any obvious zips or a visible pant line (common monster costume mistakes) but we can see that the suit is in two parts, the bottom half of which is the world’s craziest and leggiest pair of green slacks.

As in most monster films, the Octaman wants revenge on the humans who have encroached on his land and ruined it (as you might surmise from the existence of a massive, land walking octopus, Octaman has been mutated by industrial pollution) but here they have also stolen two of his kids, one of which died in a bucket en route to the lab, with the other dissected alive by a local 'scientist' (he doesn't even wash his hands). What follows is a cat and mouse chase, assuming the cat is a bloke in a rubber suit who moves very, very slowly and the mice are idiots who do everything they can to continually blunder into the cat's flailing tentacles. 

Lives are lost, lives are saved, guns are cocked, shots are fired. There's a subplot about a failing circus and the two main characters are a sweet couple, middle aged people engaged to each other. After what seems like a long time, Octaman is finally shot enough to disappear back into the toxic water with an ignominious plop. Often, films like these try to finish on an ambiguous note or perhaps set the scene for a sequel, but here 'The End' appears before the ripples have even subsided, no question mark, no ellipsis, that's the end of that.

SASQUATCH: THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT

d. Ed Ragozzino (1976)

Cryptozoology was all the rage in the mid 70s, and Big Foot was very big news in entertainment indeed, like a hairier Elton John. This curious film follows an expedition to find the legendary man of the woods, bringing together a motley group of scientists and native guides who spend months travelling into the heart of British Columbia, a densely forested wilderness covering 365,000 square miles*: the perfect place for a furry hominid who has absolutely no interest in being captured, prodded about and put into a zoo.

The film is documentary style, interspersed with recreations of famous Big Foot sightings and attacks. It's a mix of travelogue and nature film, and is really rather restful. There's some light comedy at the expense of the comical cook (who is, nevertheless, a crack shot), but mainly its just sun dappled shots of men on horses making their way carefully and slowly through a succession of beautiful, lonely settings.

There are a couple of animal attacks: a bobcat tries to eat a horse and is shot (the attack is staged, but the shooting looks authentic and leaves a bad taste) and a grizzly bear attacks an inattentive sentry (this was apparently achieved by putting Tootsie Rolls on a stuntman's shoulders, and letting the trained bear have a nibble). This latter sequence is hard to watch without smiling, probably not the intention.    

After a long while, the expedition hears a piercing and blood-chilling scream: finally, they are in Big Foot country. Big Foot clearly doesn't like visitors as he and a few friends very quickly trash the camp, throwing boulders and tree trunks with insouciant ease and breaking all the high tech equipment and a few limbs. The expeditions plan to shoot one with a tranquiliser dart comes to precisely naught, and, in the blessed relief of the morning, thoroughly defeated and lucky to be alive, they pack their smashed up shit and head for home.

We don't see much of Big Foot, just some huge, shaggy, shadowy figures in the dark, but it's enough. I don't necessarily believe in Sasquatch, but I don't necessarily disbelieve, if you know what I mean. If there is something out there, and there just might be, it will come and say 'hi' when it's ready, maybe never, which, ultimately, seems to be the moral of this tale: Big Foot likes its privacy, so don't mess with it. 

* To put this into perspective, this is the equivalent area of the entire British Isles and surrounding sea, half of Belgium, all of Luxembourg and France as far as Paris. It not only makes you realise that Big Foot could hide there indefinitely but also makes you wonder what else is in there.

THE COUCH

d. Owen Crump (1962)

Charles Campbell (Grant Williams) has issues: he's a thief and a fantasist with delusions of grandeur; he's choking with anger and sexual rage; he pretends that his hated dead father is alive, and his beloved alive sister is dead, and, every night at seven pm, he goes into the busy streets of the city and stabs a stranger to death with an ice pick. He's also in love with his psychiatrist's niece and, god help her, she feels the same way about him.

Nearly noir, nowhere near normal, most of the action takes place in public places rendered desolate and full of shadows: out of hours offices, a lonely spot overlooking the neon lit city, the busy streets at night where thousands of people walk shoulder to shoulder and fail to notice one another. No wonder some of them go a little crazy although, to be fair, our protagonist takes it as far as he can without actually falling off the edge of the planet.  

Grant Williams is a favourite actor of mine. He's somewhere between a matinee idol and a method actor, although he has a curiously pitted face, and his skin looks like a sheet of low density sandpaper. Williams plays the psycho killer as charming and weird, managing to keep his character constantly off beam but without ever rolling his eyes, gnashing his teeth and playing the obvious villain. You even feel sorry for him. When he hears something he doesn't like he shoves his fist in his mouth and bites down on it, a fairly standard bit of dramatic business apart from the fact that, when you see his hand a little later, he has actual bite marks on his knuckles. It's not necessarily acting, but it is impressive.

THE HYPNOTIC EYE

d. George Blair (1960)

The Hypnotic Eye is a hybrid film: part shock horror, part psycho thriller, part film noir. It’s also fairly nasty, being concerned with a series a horrible ‘accidents’ that befall young, beautiful women. In an arresting opening sequence, a pretty blonde happily shampoos her hair – over a gas stove.  The poor girl dies in the ensuing conflagration, the eleventh victim of who knows what, who knows who, and who knows why. The Police, as they so often are, are baffled.  

Completely coincidentally, the city is currently hosting a famous French hypnotist called Desmond, a man who can make anybody do anything just by flexing the power of his mind. Is there a connection between this suave mesmerist and a woman washing her face in sulphuric acid as if she believed it was soapy water? Or another drinking drain cleaner thinking it was coffee? And what, if anything, does his glamorous but permanently scowling assistant Justine have to do with it? You’ll just have to watch it and find out. Seriously, you should see it.

The most far out non-mutilation sequences are delivered in fabulous HypnoMagic. Not actually a cinematic variation on 3D as the poster might lead you to believe, but a dramatic style. Desmond’s act is mainly delivered direct to camera (by French actor Jacques Bergerac who is so good at it that it’s a shock to realise that he wasn’t really a hypnotist). It’s very effective and, apparently, in some cases led to some low level trance states amongst susceptible cinema goers. Don't worry, like all intelligent people I am immune to such psychic manipulation, although since watching this film I have started eating raw onions as if they were Granny Smiths.    

I DRINK YOUR BLOOD

d. David E. Durston (1970)

From the sensational title down, this fun and fast moving film is not what you’d call family viewing,  but the violence - a severed foot, a severed hand, a severed head - a stabbing where some guts falls out of the hole - is almost quaint, relying on unconvincing paper mache body parts and chunks of raw liver. Despite this, it has a reputation as a nasty film, perhaps because its main plot point is that a child injects meat pies with the dirty blood of a rabid dog in order to get his own back on the Satan worshipping hippies who raped his sister and made his granddad take LSD. That's the most unsavoury sentence I have ever written.

The Satan worshipping hippies are a multiracial Mansonesque group of scumbags who travel around backwoods America in a smelly black van stealing, squatting and spreading STDs. They’re despicable and cruel people who, in their desire to be utterly free, oppress everybody they come across, including  rats, which they hunt down and kill with great glee and sadistic violence. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t condone infecting anyone with a fatal disease but, in this case, they more than deserve it. Justice is a fickle thing, however, as the rabies doesn’t kill them straight away, instead turning them into dribbling kill and sex crazy zombie death bombs, staggering about biting people and spreading the infection like wildfire. Like all hippies, rabid or otherwise, they retain a great fear of running water, and this comes in handy for the few beleaguered residents that they haven’t managed to nibble on, include the ingenious lad who put the poison in the pie in the first place. Let’s hope somebody calls the army or, at the very least, the dog pound.   

Obviously cheap but well made, with some surprisingly good performances, I Drink Your Blood is trashy, and not exactly nice, but neither is it nasty, so pantomimic and gleeful is it in its mayhem and gore. I really enjoyed it, but then there’s something wrong with me. Fact.    

A special note about the film’s earthy synthesizer score, which is smeared all over and is completely off the chain. It was written and performed by Clay Pitts, who usually worked on Christian rock records and was clearly not a man afraid to diversify. Good work, Clay. 

WEIRD WOMAN

d. Reginald Le Borg (1944)

Inner Sanctum was a long running radio show of the 1940s that trawled through the vibrant pulp paperback market of the time for macabre stories to frighten its listeners with. Incredibly successful, the show spawned a series of spin offs including books, a TV show and several films. Weird Woman is one of them.  

Based on a book by Fritz Leiber called Conjure Wife, the story takes place in a University where the usual snobbery, social climbing and back stabbing of the academic world is being supplemented by witchcraft, some white, some black, but mostly fake and malign in nature. 

At the centre of the story is the implacable Lon Chaney, Jr. Chaney is a brilliant academic and professional skeptic who has just returned from a trip to the South Seas with a pretty young wife, a woman who was raised by a primitive tribe governed by superstition and natural magic. In marrying her he has disappointed a number of smitten women, especially chief librarian Hilary Brooke, who determines to have her revenge on him and his new love, no matter how many suicides, murder attempts and rape accusations it leads to. 

Economic in everything but imagination, Weird Woman is a superb hubbub of activity, packing a huge amount into its short running time. Favourite scenes include a tribal ritual with a great exotica soundtrack; several sequences in which disembodied heads and other superimpositions spin wildly around the screen and, more generally, the slightly silly notion that lumpy old Lon might be cat nip to the ladies. 

One woman who is not giddied by Chaney’s charm and moustache is Elizabeth Russell, who plays the crazily ambitious wife of one of his academic rivals. A regular in Val Lewton films, Russell has the most extraordinary physiognomy, like a skull covered in a thin layer of wax. Her expressions are amazingly fluid, as if her skin is so thin that every electrical impulse from her brain ripples across her face. I’m not sure how she’d manage in a romantic comedy, but in horror she is unforgettable. 

After Weird Woman, Lieber’s story was subsequently remade twice: in 1961 as the rather good Night of the Eagle starring the superb Peter Wyngarde, and once in the eighties with Richard Benjamin, a production which I have no interest in whatsoever but mention for the sake of accuracy.

THE MASK

d. Julian Roffman (1961)

Psychiatrist Allen Barnes has a patient who has stolen an ancient tribal mask from an University archive. It’s a chilling, horrible artefact, a crystalline skull with beady eyes and a hinged lantern jaw with jagged teeth, the sort of thing that looks like it should be encrusted in blood. The young man has become addicted to putting on the mask and experiencing an altered state, a sort of parallel dimension full of danger and horror. When he removes the mask, he feels the overwhelming urge to kill*.

Falling apart, the young man commits suicide, first posting the mask to Dr Barnes. Barnes, a rationalist and seeker of truth, cannot resist the temptation to put the mask on himself. What happens next is a form of Hell, as the psychiatrist sees the same terrible visions as his patient, undergoes the same ordeal, feels the same urges – and, almost instantly, begins to go completely insane.

A tremendous, supremely leftfield film, The Mask is good throughout but superlative in its four surreal 3D sequences. These nightmarish scenes have an extraordinary primal power: savage, pagan, occult, violent, disturbing and discombobulating. I've watched them with the glasses on and off and, actually, prefer the blurred reds and blues of the unprocessed image. The scenes are accompanied by the swoops and bleeps of an analogue electronic score and are absolutely outstanding, perhaps the best use of 3D ever.

On the film’s release, the audience were given a ‘magic, mystic mask’, a shaped set of 3D glasses. When a voice from the screen demanded ‘Put the mask on, NOW!’ they would don the glasses and enter the warped fantasy at the same time as the increasingly frazzled hero. My God, how I wish I’d been there.

* So many psychotronic films hinge on ‘the urge to kill’ that, in real life, the human race should technically have all been murdered long ago.  

THE ATOMIC SUBMARINE

d. Spencer Gordon Bennett (1959)

For a long while The Atomic Submarine goes around in circles as we watch the bickering crew of the state of the art USS Sharkfish scour the Arctic Ocean looking for the cause of a series of maritime disasters. When their quarry is revealed as a flying saucer, however, things start to gather pace, culminating in a small group of sailors boarding the alien craft and establishing contact with its pilot. Most of the men end up dead, horribly burned by a heat ray or crushed between automatic doors, but 'Reef' Holloway (Arthur Franz) survives, establishing a psychic link with the invader, a hideous creature who resembles a clump of seaweed with tentacles and has one enormous, all seeing eye. This unprecedented close encounter of the third kind prompts the following exchange:

Alien: We meet face to face.

Holloway: That’s a face?

Alien: Point of view is everything.   

The alien snottily explains via telekinesis that his race want to colonise the Earth and need human specimens to experiment on, and Holloway's life has been spared so that he can be vivisected. Holloway has other ideas, of course.

Holloway: To navigate, won’t you have to see your way?  

Alien: Obviously.

(Holloway pulls out a Very pistol and shoots the alien, blowing out its eyeball)

Holloway: Could be rough!

The triumphant submariner then makes his escape as his blinded foe throws his fronds around in agony, viscous gunk glooping from its brand new hole. The previously rather smug alien has learned an important lesson about human beings: never under estimate their survival instinct, or their capacity to cause pain. It’s a short period of reflection, though, as the UFO is almost immediately destroyed by a ground to air missile: job done, Earth saved. For now.

Please note: this is not a proper submarine film, so do not expect any popping rivets, sweaty faces or corpses and oil being jettisoned to the surface to fool enemy battle ships. I'm still quite miffed about that, actually.