Product Description
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Cult Camp Classics Vol. 1 - Sci Fi Thrillers (DVD)
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Featuring three enjoyably "awful" movies from 1958-59, Cult Camp
Classics, Vol. 1: Sci-Fi Thrillers turns nuclear radiation into
cause for celebration, especially if you enjoy movies with extra
cheese. With the Cold War in full swing and society's worries
blamed on the threat of nuclear annihilation, sci-fi buffs (like
future filmmakers Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, and John Landis)
could see a new monster movie almost every week. Many of them
came from Allied Artists, the low-budget B-movie production
company (formerly Monogram) that rose from the ghetto of "poverty
row" distribution to produce countless exploitation thrillers
between 1946 and 1979. The '50s saw the rise of nuclear monster
thrillers, and Allied popularized the trend with its own
menagerie of giant, irradiated creatures. The key to Allied's
success was its crowd-pleasing combination of exploitable
ingredients, and what better way to combine sci-fi, sex, and
horror than to unleash a towering babe with an attitude problem?
That's exactly what Allied did with Attack of the 50-Foot Woman,
a now-classic campfest in which a spurned wife (Allison Hayes) is
irradiated by a glowing alien space-ball, grows to a height of
(you guessed it), and exacts revenge upon her cheating husband
(William Hudson). A year before she bared her shapely backside as
Playboy's Playmate of the Month for July 1959, Yvette Vickers
costars as Hudson's scheming mistress, giving the film an extra
boost of sex appeal. With bargain-priced effects including a
giant floppy-fingered hand, hilarious process s, and cheesy
models destroyed by the world's biggest bitch (for whom it is
still possible to feel some sympathetic compassion), the movie's
not as good as its celebrated (which now adorns movie-geek
T-shirts around the world), but it's still a lot of fun.
The Giant Behemoth was director Eugene Lourie's obvious attempt
to capitalize on his 1953 hit The Beast from 20,000 homs,
starring a gigantic paleosaurus rising from the Atlantic with a
bad case of atomic radiation. London is the monster's eventual
stomping ground, but the lumbering lizard is camera-shy for
nearly an hour; you can imagine Beaver Cleaver and his pals
groaning through seemingly endless scenes of talky exposition,
anxiously awaiting the climactic stop-motion creature effects
supervised by the legendary Willis (King Kong) O'Brien. Scoring
much higher on the camp-o-meter, and far more entertaining, is
the cult classic Queen of Outer Space, which borrows props and
costumes from Forbidden Planet, Flight to Mars and World Without
End for its outrageously kitschy plot about manly astronauts who
c-land on Venus and discover an underground society of
mini-skirted space-babes. Unfortunately the disfigured Venusian
queen (Laurie Mitchell) is a man-hater supreme, so the
spectacularly costumed Zsa Zsa Gabor (as a Venusian scientist, no
less) leads a revolution against her. With a screenplay by
Twilight Zone veteran Charles Beaumont and a story credited
(almost incredibly) to legendary playwright/screenwriter Ben
Hecht (who surely never suspected his idea would eventually yield
this movie), Queen of Outer Space is exactly what you'd expect it
to be: So bad it's good, and more than worthy of inclusion in
this irresistibly priced triple-feature set. --Jeff Shannon
On the DVDs
Three feature-length commentaries accompany the sci-fi thrillers
in Cult Camp Classics, Vol. 1. Two of the commentaries are hosted
by Tom Weaver, a noted authority on sci-fi and horror films whose
historical acumen is more casual than academic: While sharing the
commentary on Queen of Outer Space with the film's titular star
Laurie Mitchell (who became a mainstay at fan conventions at
Weaver's invitation), Weaver fails to explain how the production
came to use props and costumes from the classic Forbidden Planet,
and that's a glaring over. He compensates as an amiable
interviewer with the equally good-natured Mitchell, and it's a
treat to hear them enthusiastically reading unfilmed scenes from
the film's original screenplay. For the commentary on Attack of
the 50-Foot Woman, Weaver is joined by the film's comely costar
Yvette Vickers (another regular at sci-fi conventions), and their
combined anecdotes provide an adequate oral history of this
camp-classic production. Star Wars veterans and special-effects
masters Dennis Muren and Phil Tippett provide the loose-and-lazy
commentary on The Giant Behemoth, which consists mostly of Muren
making sarcastic jokes about the film's glacial pacing. It's
hardly the authoritative commentary that some fans might've hoped
for, but Muren and Tippett are well-versed in special-effects
history (Muren even owns the original stop-motion Behemoth
creature model), and they share an infectious enthusiasm for the
films that inspired them to excel in their profession. --Jeff
Shannon