PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!

d. Ray Milland (1962)

A sombre, tense film about life in America in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear strike, Panic in Year Zero! starts happily enough, with Harry Baldwin (Ray Milland) and his family setting out on a fishing expedition. A couple of hours into the journey, Harry sees a series of flashes in his rear view mirror, and stops the car just in time to see a mushroom cloud billowing over what used to be Los Angeles.

What happens next unfolds slowly and meticulously, as Harry tries to get his family to a safe place in the hills before the world goes crazy. In order to do so, he must become a more ruthless and resourceful man than his wife ever expected him to be, a man of decisive action and no little force: within an hour, for instance, he is holding a shop keeper at gun point for refusing to take a cheque then, a little later, he knocks out a filling station attendant who is trying to charge him $300 for $10 of petrol.

Harry has immediately grasped that the war will not just be between America and its enemies but between ordinary people fighting to live, not to mention an element that will use the bomb as an excuse to let their more anarchic tendencies loose. Harry’s wife very much disapproves of her husband’s methods, even after their teenage daughter is raped by two hoodlums. While she cries and wrings her hands Harry tracks down the rapists and kills them, ably assisted by his son (Frankie Avalon), who is not only seeing his stuffy old man in a totally different light, but also getting quite an apprenticeship in the ancient art of survival.

The army picks up the reins after a few days and things start to return to - well, not normal as most of the cities of the world have been wiped out. It’s been a nightmare, of course, but, secretly, you know that Harry and his son are just a little disappointed that it’s all over. A final caption states 'There must be no end - only a new beginning'. Good luck with that. 

It would be interesting to know what the US government thought of the film, as it’s not a particularly edifying or comforting message. But it is realistic, thought provoking and rather good. 

As a final note, there are a lot of automobiles in this film, and most of them have wood stuck on the side of them. It's a rather sweet, forgotten detail: human beings used to make their moor vehicles partially out of wood, as if we weren't quite ready to make the leap from cart to car.

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.       

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. 

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.  

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.

THE DARK

d. John Cardos (1979)

The original storyline for The Dark was fairly straightforward: an abused child is held prisoner in an attic until he reaches adulthood. When a house fire kills his abusers and sets him free he heads to the city and, completely unhinged, begins a brutal killing spree, averaging a murder a night and earning the nickname ‘The Mangler’. With the death count rising, it’s up to the Police, an investigative journalist, the father of a murdered girl and an eccentric psychic to find The Mangler and stop him in his tracks. It’s not exactly Shakespeare, but it works. Halfway through filming, having already fired director Tobe Hooper, the producers decided that aliens were the big thing, so The Mangler should be an alien, effectively throwing the film against the wall and letting it slide ignobly to the ground, bloodied and bent out of shape.

The alien looks like a werewolf or a make-up free Gene Simmons in a lumberjack outfit, a huge shambling thing with grey, putrid flesh. It possesses enormous strength, is impervious to bullets* and can fire lasers from its eyes, and, believe me, it fires lasers from its eyes a lot. It doesn’t like being set fire to but then, to be honest, who does?  In the end analysis, it’s an extremely crappy thing to ruin a film for, and what remains is a mass of non-sequiturs and undeveloped detail, with promising characters and situations cut off and cauterised in favour of expedient gimmickry that doesn’t make any kind of dramatic or cinematic sense.

As a final insult, the producers bookend the ruin with bullshit, firstly with a caption which pontificates about the certainty of life on other planets and that, like some nasty earth creatures, aliens might prove to be aggressive and deadly to man and, finally, with a concluding narration in a gravelly voice which states 'it was an encounter that has no explanation or understanding', i.e. 'Fuck knows what happened there. Right, see you later’. It’s extremely unsatisfactory, especially as it wastes a decent cast, a good cinematographer, Panavision, a $2m dollar budget and an unusual and interesting score** – this isn’t shoestring or amateur film-making, it’s just what happens when artless, greedy people are calling the shots.

*  I can understand how aliens might not be killed by a bullet, but this creature is literally shot a thousand times in the course of the final ten minutes. It’s clearly organic, so, at the very least,  wouldn’t bits of his body be torn apart, or severed? If nothing else, Wouldn’t the sheer weight of the bullets slow him down?

** In moments of tension, the soundtrack has a sibilant, insistent voice whispering ‘the dark-nessssssssssssss’.

THE MONOLITH MONSTERS

d. John Sherwood (1957)

After a marvellously solemn monologue about the nature of comets and the daily threat they pose to the Earth, The Monolith Monsters starts with a chunk of obsidian black space rock smashing into a Californian salt flat, spreading debris all over the desert. When the rock gets wet, it grows, forming vast towers which then topple over and smash, with each broken piece growing again to form a new tower. For the people of the small community of San Angelo this presents two problems: firstly, their little town is directly in the path of the rampaging rocks and, secondly, anyone who gets too close to the space debris has all the silicone sucked from their bodies and subsequently turns to stone. It’s a hell of a concept (sci fi film genius Jack Arnold was one of the men behind it) and it’s well executed, too.

The shots of the black monoliths growing, falling, then springing up again, in particular, are startling, especially when you realise that, with nothing to stop them, they could, with time and rain, crush the whole world. There’s no question of the rock being intelligent, it just does what it does, over and over, unthinking, unfeeling, and unaware of any consequence. It’s rather chilling, but then nature, regardless of its point of origin, often is.

The main characters in the film are Geologists* and Doctors, so the focus is on finding a logical, scientific solution rather than simply screaming and hoping for a lucky break or an act of God. I’m not sure if a sentence like ‘Chert, Feldspar, Pyroxene, almost all of the Olivine group, Flint, almost solid Silica' makes any sense to someone with a BSc, but it sounds right to someone who hasn't, and that’s half the battle.

* The chief scientist is the excellent Grant Williams, perhaps best known as The Incredible Shrinking Man, another Jack Arnold master work.

THE CRAWLING HAND

d. Herbert L. Strock (1963)

The Crawling Hand is a low budget film which uses the space race to colour a fairly traditional horror story. In it, a moon shoot ends in disaster when, on the return journey,  the rocket goes haywire. Despite having run out of oxygen some twenty minutes previously, the Astronaut's frightened (and frightening) face appears on the mission control monitors, alternately hissing ‘kill!’ and ‘press the red’, i.e. the button that will destroy him and his ship. As the ship is about to crash into a populated area, mission control press the button and the ship explodes, showering debris all over the coastline including, on a secluded beach, the Astronaut’s arm, sheared off at the elbow, but still wearing its glove and spacesuit sleeve (I was reminded of J.G Ballard at this stage, almost certainly not the film makers intention).

A brilliant but brooding young science student (‘I’m going to the top – and I’m making it on my own!’) wraps the severed arm in a shower curtain and takes it back to his digs where it promptly strangles his landlady and then takes him over: forcing him to do bad things until he gets flu and his high temperature weakens the arm to the extent that he can break the link and stab the severed limb repeatedly with a broken bottle. Hungry junkyard cats finish the job. Or do they? No, not really. The uncanny is not so easily disposed of.     

The Crawling Hand has a sliver of science behind the narrative, the reasoning being that mixing Earth molecules (pronounced ‘mole-ecules’ by the Chief Scientist) with space matter might possibly result in a hybrid life form that grows incredibly quickly and wants to kill everything. Yes, it’s tenuous, but this isn’t the sort of film that has to try and justify itself, so the vague attempt is actually rather charming. 

The best scenes feature the creepy hand crawling around, using its burned and degraded fingers to pull itself towards the next throat it wants to throttle. Full of filler and filmed on the hoof (the actors don't stop when they make mistakes) the concept of a parasitic virus from space owes a  lot to Quatermass, but mainly resembles a slightly wonky ghost train ride. Tellingly, the protagonists are attractive teenagers, hopped up on soda pop, young love and The Bird Is The Word by The Rivingtons, which features heavily throughout.

There is probably a monograph to be written about crawling hands in the movies, from The Beast With Five Fingers through to The Evil Dead and beyond. They're mainly horror films, of course, severed hands don't normally creep around in anything else. 

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN

d. Jack Arnold (1957)

'Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too'.

Despite it's sensational title, 'The Incredible Shrinking Man' is an astonishingly thoughtful, even profound film, especially at its conclusion, where our hapless hero, now less an inch high, stoicly accepts his fate and embraces the process of slowly melding into the Universe. 

It starts, like so many stories, with a normal person (blog fave Grant Williams, who is excellent) being made abnormal by exposure to radioactivity, in this case via a dirty cloud that sweeps over him while he's out yachting. Shortly afterwards, he notices that his clothes are becoming looser and, ominously, his wedding ring falls from his finger. Medical science are baffled and pretty useless as 'people just don't get shorter' (actually, they get shorter all the time, particularly as they get older. In fact, people get shorter over the course of a normal day, and are always tallest when they get out bed: fact).  

Within a few months, he's incredibly angry and living a wretched life barricaded in a dolls house under constant threat of dismemberment by his own pet cat. It's terribly sad, especially as the mysterious condition diminishes him in every way except mentally, leaving him all the time in the world to question himself as a husband, as a man, as a human being.

Eventually, he ends up lost in the basement, presumed dead by his family and locked into a life or death battle with a resident spider. He drinks water that drips from the boiler and lives on crumbs from a slab of stale cake. It's a hard, miserable existence, and there is a palpable sense of relief when he finally realises that his normal life is gone forever and that whatever his future brings will be at a sub-atomic level. So, he raises his eyes to the night sky and accepts he will go from microscopic to submicroscopic, from quark to proton, finally becoming an infinitesimally small, nameless particle known only to God, to whom 'there is no zero'. 

I'd like to have that sort of courage and spiritual depth, but I'm a bit of a 'fuck it' person, so I'd probably just impale myself on a needle or jump on a mouse trap. We all have our own way of shrinking away to nothing, I suppose.

THE CAPE CANAVERAL MONSTERS

d. Phil Tucker (1960)

For all its power and wealth and air punching bravado, America is a frightened country: scared of infiltration, scared of domination, scared of difference, scared of dissent, scared of being unable to follow the manifest destiny invented to give them the excuse to do whatever they want. In The Cape Canaveral Monsters the Americans come up against aliens who share this self-centred obsession, but rather impudently have a manifest destiny of their own: to own and rule Earth.

The aliens take the form of hyperactive balls of light whose jittery movements are accompanied by discordant, disorienting music. They have the ability to live in human corpses, and live in human corpses they do, starting their invasion by causing a fatal car crash and casually moving into the male and female victims. Both are hideously disfigured, and the male corpse has his arm ripped off, but the aliens reason that they're not entering any beauty contests and there are lots of spare arms out there and, besides, the bloke alien can always stick his clearly not missing arm down the side of his trousers and hope for the best.  

Their mission is to disrupt missile tests at Cape Canaveral using some sort of magnetic ray gun. Whatever it is, it works. The idea is to destabilise the space programme and prepare the way for an alien invasion. Only a sex obsessed young scientist and his put upon girlfriend can save the Earth and after 70 minutes of fairly uneventful narrative, they do. It ends on an ambiguous note, so the Americans stay scared and angry, their default position. 

Not a bad film, but that doesn't make it a good one. It's okay, and I'm okay with that and so should you be.       

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN

d. A. Edward Sutherland (1940)

The Invisible Woman has very little to do with H.G Wells, instead being a frivolous screwball comedy full of broad performances and lots of knockabout humour.

John Barrymore is the head scientist, a twinkly eccentric who has discovered the secret of invisibility. When he advertises for a human ‘victim’, he gets Kitty Carroll (Virginia Bruce), a headstrong young woman looking to heed ‘the call to adventure’. The experiment requires the subject to be naked, a detail that attracts much prurient interest and a great number of jokes, even though the most you see is a pair of bare legs. The story is padded out with a bit of romance and a subplot about a gangster who wants to steal the process but, for the most part, it’s mainly about glasses of brandy and lampshades and cats whizzing about with no visible means of support whilst supporting characters look on aghast. If you like that sort of thing (I do), it’s a lot of harmless, undemanding fun.

Barrymore is in his late fifties here, but looks in his seventies. He gives a good but pantomimic performance, but then the production isn't notable for its subtlety.  In a change from the usual self-parodying roles of this era, the script only makes a couple of references to his real life reputation as a drunken ne’er do well and womaniser, and even lets him declaim a few Shakespearean lines. Bearing in mind that he has only a year and a half to live he seems in pretty good form, but then, for all his troubles, he was always a good actor.

THE NIGHT THE WORLD EXPLODED

d. Fred F. Sears

A dedicated scientist invents a machine that can forecast earthquakes just in time to predict that the world is about to be destroyed by a series of uncontrollable explosions. The cause is Element 112, a previously unknown type of rock that (rather like the stuff in Monolith Monsters, but in reverse) increases its mass when it dries out, then explodes with enormous force. Nobody is quite sure why this is happening, or where all the stock footage came from, although a pretty young scientific intern has a theory: ‘it’s like the Earth is paying us back for stealing its natural resources’*.

An early-ish example of an eco-disaster film, The Night The World Exploded is cheap but charming, if slightly confusing (the disasters take place during the day for a start). Despite being just over an hour long, however, and being about exploding rocks and volcanoes and the end of the world, it does drag a little bit, not least in the scenes where we watch people descending rope ladders into the Carlsbad Caverns for about ten minutes.

* Later on, the chief scientist comes up with a theory: 'it's like the Earth is paying us back for stealing its natural resources'.

THE MOLE PEOPLE

d. Virgil W. Vogel (1956) 

The Mole People is a legendary b-movie, a sort of barometer of the psychotronic. It's cheap, ridiculous and has men grown dressed up as moles - but it is also inventive and entertaining and commits itself fully to the endeavour. There is no smirking, no camp, no sense that this film (about the discovery of a race of evil Sumerians who have survived for 5,000 years by living under an active volcano) is anything other than the greatest story ever told. This sense of purpose, this dogged belief, is essential in the creation of great b-movies, as any doubt or irony always shows on screen.

There's very little to dislike about this film, even if you're a historian, a Sumerian or, perhaps, even a mole. A catalogue of simple pleasures: the brief prologue in which the enthusiastic and engaging Dr. Frank Baxter runs through some hollow earth theories and introduces the film as a fable; the Sumerians themselves who still wear ancient costumes and have genetically mutated after years underground to become albinos, so much so that they are terrified by electric torches and are burned to death by direct sunlight; the fact that they have enslaved the original inhabitants of the volcano, the Molemen,  who are whipped by the Sumerians constantly as they scrabble around in the dirt looking for the mushrooms that everyone eats for every meal EVERY DAY. I was also entertained by the interpretive dance set to an accompaniment of gongs and bongos and, perhaps most of all, I enjoyed Alan  Napier* as the High Priest, caked in white face powder and wearing rheumy contacts and a straggly moustache, beautifully declaiming his lines with the dignity and diction of a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. 

I am smiling rather than sneering and quite sincere when I say that this is one of the high watermarks of low quality films. I absolutely guarantee that you will enjoy it more than anything else on telly this evening, so why not give it a go? 

* Best known as Alfred the Butler from the Adam West Batman series.

I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE

d. Gene Fowler, Jr (1958)

Despite the sensational title, this is quite sombre, serious stuff. In it, an advance party of aliens arrive on earth and take over the minds and bodies of some of the male inhabitants of a small town. What do they want? Well, their own females have all died in the wake of a nuclear war, so they are after wives and girlfriends, which somehow seems much worse and far more presumptuous than simply zapping everybody to death and taking over the planet.

The aliens here are a fantastic conception, with hideous tentacled faces that are reminiscent of Lovecraft's cephalopod-like Cthulu. Their space suits seemingly provide them with an artificial atmosphere, and glow and vibrate so that they are hard to see, like a hallucination - or a nightmare. The aliens have the husks of their kidnap victims back in the mother ship, hanging mindlessly in the air, hooked up to some sort of transmitting device that allows the aliens to inhabit a facsimile of their bodies and access their memories and thought patterns - and their wives, especially their wives*. 

Even so, the aliens make unconvincing humans, at least as far as their wives are concerned: they can't have kids for a start (their scientists are working on this), dogs and cats hate them and, incredibly for 1950s America, they don't touch alcohol, not even cocktails. Naturally, they don't last long and are ultimately hunted down by a good old fashioned angry mob and killed, collapsing and coalescing into a pool of dirty bubbles as they die.

The final shot is of hundreds of saucers leaving the earth's atmosphere and moving on to the next galaxy: defeated, ugly men, still desperately looking for love.

* In the outwardly prim and proper 1950s, 'marriage' is synonymous with sex. The inference is quite clear: these fucking aliens are fucking our fucking women.

THE FLIGHT THAT DISAPPEARED

d. Reginald Le Borg (1961)

Resembling an over extended episode of The Twilight Zone (there's half a compliment there, anyway) this film tells the story of three people who meet on a flight to Washington and realise that they are all on the way to the same meeting, a meeting that might actually lead to the extinction of mankind. For the record, they are a nuclear physicist, a rocket expert and a theoretical mathematician and between them their heads hold the ingredients of a super weapon which would make the H Bomb look like the cordite strip from a Christmas cracker.  

As they fly towards the American capitol, however, something strange happens. Despite the pilot's best efforts, the plane keeps rising and rising, even after all four engines cut out. At a height of ten miles, the plane becomes frozen amongst the clouds, and only our three boffins are left conscious. They make their way onto a mist shrouded patch of land (in the sky!) and are met by a group of ticked off looking people representing the as yet unborn generations of Earth. Yes, it's a trial, an unusual court where people who may never exist are passing judgement on people for something they haven't actually done yet. 

Just as the trio of scientists are being sentenced to an eternity in stasis, an older white haired man emerges through the fog and challenges the verdict. I think he might have been God, he certainly didn't look like a human rights lawyer. In any event, the three are returned to the plane which is allowed to continue its journey.

At first, the three assume it was all a bizarre dream (perhaps not surprising given how many cigarettes, cups of coffee and glasses of scotch they had imbibed on the flight) but, when they get to Washington and informed that they are over 24 hours late, they admit that something truly cosmic has happened and throw all their notes into the nearest waste paper basket, presumably to be immediately picked up by the nearest commie spy masquerading as an airport cleaner.  

THE 27th DAY

d. William Asher (1957) 

'People hate because they fear, and they fear everything they don't understand, which is almost everything'.

Aliens abduct five people from as many different countries: an English woman, an American journalist, a German scientist, a Chinese refugee and a Russian Soldier. Aboard the mother ship, a rather suave alien spokesman tells his guests that his planet is dying and his people would quite like to move to Earth but, as they are a fair and peaceful people, an invasion is out of the question. He goes on to say that as humans seem pretty intent on destroying themselves, anyway, the aliens have come up with a plan. Each of the abductees is given a box that contains three capsules holding enough combined power to kill every human being on Earth quickly, quietly and cleanly without the destructive power of a nuclear war. The alien simply requests that if the people of Earth do decide to blow themselves to bits in the next 27 days, then could they please use the capsules rather than bombs to facilitate human extinction, as this will leave the planet intact so the aliens can move right in. After 27 days, the aliens will have to make other arrangements, perhaps look to rent some temporary accommodation.

Not blowing up the Earth for 27 days seems fairly straightforward, of course, even at the height of the Cold War, but the Aliens immediately up the ante by appearing on every TV in the world and giving out the names of the abductees and some tentative details of the incredible power that they now possess. There's nothing like a bit of extraterrestrial intervention to put mankind into a tail spin, of course, so everything goes mental: there are riots in Cornwall, panic in Los Angeles; the Chinese lady stabs herself, the German professor searches for a solution, the Brit and the Yank fall in love. The Russian soldier, poor devil, is almost tortured to death by his own evil communist overlords, so eager are they to find out the secret to killing every American. Damn Russians*. 

The ending has not one but two very gratifying twists, a more than satisfactory ending to an unusual and intriguing film about how fundamentally rubbish humans are - and how ultimately marvellous they can be once the get past all the bullshit.    

* In contrast, the US government are shown as a benign, supportive group of people who have only humanity's best interests at heart. Yeah, right.   

THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE

d. Joseph Green (1962)

'Let me die, let me die'

The human brain is the most complex thing in the Universe and, since the Enlightenment downgraded the soul to a might have rather than a must have, it's also the most important thing we possess. Little wonder, then, that the brain fascinates scientists the world over, particularly in films like The Brain That Wouldn't Die, where the line between scientific genius and obsessive fanaticism is a very thin one indeed.

Doctor Bill Cortner is full of the energy and arrogance of youth, a man in a hurry to prove his theories on the transplantation of limbs and organs to the extent that he has become unethical, performing illegal operations using body parts pilfered from the hospital where he works. When his fiancee Jan is decapitated in a car crash, he takes the opportunity to pluck her severed head from the burning wreckage, wrapping it up in his jacket and taking it to a secret lab, bringing it back to life with a 'new special compound' that not only reinvigorates the head but makes it telepathic.

Jan's head, plonked on a metal tray full of chemicals and filled with tubes and pipes, is pretty pissed off about the arrangement and asks repeatedly to die. Bill has other ideas, however, checking out strip clubs and beauty contests in search of a suitably pneumatic replacement chassis before settling on a facially scarred but otherwise intact nude model.

From here, it all gets quite complicated, despite being defiantly non complex. All I can say is that between the giant homicidal freak locked in a closet and poor decapitated Jan's overpowering death drive, it can only end in flames.      

KRONOS

d. Kurt Neumann (1957)

When a huge asteroid crashes into the ocean, a crack scientific team are called out to investigate. What they don’t know, however, is that the asteroid is actually a UFO, and that the director of their scientific laboratory has been taken over by aliens, a race of people who have expended their own resources and are now travelling the universe seeing what they can steal from other planets. The aliens live by consuming energy: electrical, atomic, they’re not bothered, they just need lots of it and they don’t care where and how they get it.

To this end, they unleash an enormous, incredible machine onto the world, tall, black, metal, like a modernist sculpture of two water cisterns welded together. When the aliens are hungry, Kronos (as it is dubbed by one of the scientists – he knows his mythology, but can’t spell) rises up on hydraulic metal legs and more or less pogoes over to the next available power station and sucks it dry, crushing screaming peasants in his path. 

Can it be stopped? Well, yeah. For Dr Who fans, the solution is so obvious it’s amazing it takes the scientists and their computer SUSIE (Synchro Unifying Sinometric Integrating Equitensor) so long to come up with it: they reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.

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.