The TSL Horror Grindhouse: The Sinister Urge (dir by Edward D. Wood, Jr.)

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1960’s The Sinister Urge opens with a shot of a blonde woman running down a highway while clad only her underwear.

As I watched this scene unfold, I was reminded of a chapter in Hollywood Rat Race, a non-fiction book about the sordidness of the film industry that was written by Edward D. Wood, Jr. The chapter takes the form of a letter to aspiring young actresses who come to Hollywood, convinced that they’ll become stars. In the chapter, Wood asks what the innocent young ingenue will do if a director tries to force her to film a scene in just her underwear. Will you give in, Wood asks, or will you stick true to your values? Wood seems to suggest that the actress should say no, no matter how much pressure the director puts on her. Of course, Wood himself was a director, as well as a writer. In fact, he directed The Sinister Urge.

The Sinister Urge is about the dark side of the film industry. Police Lt. Matt Carson (Kenne Duncan) and Sgt. Randy Stone (Duke Moore) are investigating a series of murders. The victims have all been women and they’ve all been killed in the same park. Carson and Stone suspect that the murders might be connected. Gee, guys, ya think so?

The murders are being committed by Dirk Williams (Dino Fantini), a knife-wielding teenager who works for the local pornographic filmmakers, Johnny (Carl Anthony) and Gloria (Jean Fontaine). Dirk has become addicted to viewing pornography and it’s driven him crazy. Johnny, who laments that he was once a serious filmmaker before he found himself reduced to directing and distributing “smut” to make money, is full of guilt and self-loathing. Gloria doesn’t care about anything other than making money through selling smutty pictures and movies. She doesn’t care that she’s helping to produce a product that is inspiring the sinister urge that drives Dirk to kill.

Can Dirk be stopped before he attacks innocent Mary Smith (Jeanne Willardson), who has fallen into the clutches of Gloria’s smut syndicate? (That’s a great band name, by the way.) And how will Dirk react when he learns that both Johnny and Gloria are thinking about sacrificing him for the greater good of their evil organization?

The Sinister Urge is an over-the-top melodrama that is clearly an Ed Wood production. (Posters for Plan 9 From Outer Space and Bride of the Monster appear in Johnny’s office.) Some of the actors deliver their lines stiffly. Some of them delvier their lines with just a little bit too much emotion. The hard-boiled dialogue is full of cliches. The action sometimes comes to a complete stop so that the cops can discuss the threat of adult films. The film may be sordid but it’s all presented with such an earnest DIY style that it becomes rather fascinating to watch. At one point, Wood spliced in footage from a totally different film because why not? Wood had the footage. The Sinister Urge was running short. Why not pad out the length with something totally unrelated? That never surrender spirit is why Ed Wood remains a beloved figure 100 years after he was born in Poughkeepsie.

Sadly enough, this was Wood’s final “mainstream” film. After this film, he could only find work writing adult novels and writing and directing the same type of movies that are criticized in The Sinister Urge. (One has to wonder if The Sinister Urge was Wood’s attempt to satirize the moral panic of the time.) Sadly, Wood sank into alcoholism and died 17 years after this film was released. He was 54 years old. His films, however, live on.

Retro Television Review: Malibu, CA 1.13 “Mom Returns”

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Malibu CA, which aired in Syndication in 1998 and 1999. The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

This week, Jason and Scott’s mom returns to America and quickly decides to leave again.

Episode 1.13 “Mom Returns”

(Dir by Gary Shimokawa, originally aired on January 17th, 1999)

With their Dad stuck in San Diego on his birthday, Jason and Scott decide to throw a wild party at the house. The music is loud. The house is crowded. Murray jumps off the second floor balcony. The police show up and start dancing. Oddly enough, Stads shows up and there’s absolutely no awkwardness between her and Jason, despite the fact that they just broke up.

Everything is going great until Michele (Carol Huston) shows up.

Michele is Jason and Scott’s mother, the one who sent them to Malibu so that she could take a job in Saudi Arabia. She’s returned home and Jason and Scott panic that she’s going to order them to return to New York. When they overhear Michele talking to their Dad about getting married again, Jason and Scott are convinced that their parents are getting back together.

Of course, this being a Peter Engel-produced show, it’s all a big misunderstanding. Michele is getting married again but she’s marrying a guy that she met in Saudi Arabia. In fact, she’s planning on spending another year in Saudi Arabia. I guess she likes not being allowed to drive and having to cover herself from head to toe while living in the middle of the desert. Still, when Jason and Scott start wearing suits and behaving like perfect angels in an attempt to convince their mom to let them stay in Malibu, their Dad decides to play a trick on them and basically allows them to believe that he and Michele are getting back together….

Wow, what a fucking asshole.

Seriously, it’s rare that I curse but this is one of the worst things that I’ve ever seen a television father do. I’m a child of divorce. I know exactly how it feels to fool yourself into thinking that your parents are going to get back together. That’s not something joke about.

Their father also jokes about sending his sons to Saudi Arabia. He even gives them some keffiyehs to wear. The audience laughs. Today, of course, Scott and Jason would just look like a typical Ivy Leaguer.

Anyway, after this episode, I understand why Michele got a divorce and couldn’t wait to get away from the kids. She probably could have escaped to a less misogynistic country but I guess she was desperate.

While all of this was going on, Sam and Stads competed to see who could raise the most money for charity. Stads really got over Sam kissing her boyfriend quickly! Both of them recruit Tracy to help them raise money. Tracy walks around the beach in a bikini and says, “Who wants to give me money?” It works.

This was a dumb episode.

Horror Film Review: Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II (dir by Takao Okaware)

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Mechagodzilla is back!

Well, not quite. While 1993’s Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II does indeed feature a giant robotic Godzilla who gets into a battle with the real Godzilla, this Mechagodzilla is not the same Mechagodzilla who appeared in the previous Mechagodzilla film. (Maybe I just like typing Mechagodzilla, who knows?) Instead, this Mechagodzilla is a robot that was built by G-Force, the military branch of United Nations Godzilla Countermeasures Center. (Booo! Thanks for wasting our tax money, UN!) This Mechagodzilla has been built out of parts left over from Mechaghidorah and it exists not to conquer the world but to protect it.

Wow, that was an exhausting paragraph to write. On the one hand, I appreciate the fact that the Heisei era Godzilla films actually made an attempt to maintain a consistent continuity. On the other hand, it’s difficult to keep track of all of these different monsters and robots. I have to admit that trying to follow the plots of these movies always tends to make my ADD go crazy. Really, the important thing is that Godzilla fights a giant robot version of himself and Rodan helps out!

That’s right. Everyone’s favorite Pterodactyl shows up in this film. (The previous film in the franchise reunited Godzilla with Mothra so it just makes sense that Rodan would eventually return.) Godzilla gets upset when he discovers that Rodan has a Baby Godzilla egg in her nest and, after an absolutely adorable mini-Godzilla hatches from the egg, the two of them fight over him. However, Godzilla and Rodan later team up to battle Mechagodzilla. The monsters may not like each other but they get even more annoyed with robot versions of themselves. One thing that I really appreciate about the Godzilla films of the 80s and 90s is that they show just how exhausting it is for these monsters to constantly have to fight each other. Godzilla and Rodan are both exhausted towards the end of this movie. At one point, it appears that Rodan makes the ultimate sacrifice to save Godzilla and I have to admit that I got surprisingly emotional at that point. But then I remembered that Rodan was going to show up in a later movie and immediately start fighting Godzilla again. Seriously, monsters are like cats when it comes to showing each other appreciation.

Anyway, the main attraction here is Baby Godzilla, who is absolutely adorable in a way that horrific-looking Son of Godzilla never was. It helps that Baby actually looks like Godzilla as opposed to looking like the bastard monster child of Godzilla’s mailman. There’s an awe inspiring scene where Baby Godzilla runs up to Godzilla and we see that Baby Godzilla is barely the size of grown Godzilla’s big toe. It’s both a cute scene and a reminder that Godzilla is beyond huge.

This was an entertaining entry in the Godzilla franchise. The plot is less important than the battles and the cuteness of Baby Godzilla. Try all you want, G-Force. WE LOVE GODZILLA!

Previous Godzilla Reviews:

Icarus File No. 15: Glen or Glenda (dir by Edward D. Wood, Jr.)

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today is the 100th birthday of Edward D. Wood, Jr., the director who is often referred to as being “the worst director of all time.” Personally, I’ve never really agreed with that title. Ed Wood had a long career in Hollywood and yes, he may have worked exclusively in B-movies and yes, he eventually turned to softcore and then hardcore porn to pay the bills and yes, his life ended under rather tragic circumstances. But, unlike most truly bad directors, his films are still being watched today and, again unlike most bad directors, his style is immediately recognizable. You don’t need to see his name in the credits to know when a film was directed by Ed Wood. You just have to keep an eye out for stock footage, a few familiar actors, and a lot of angora.

If anything, Ed Wood was a director whose ambitions far outweighed the money that he could usually raise for his films. On the one hand, Plan 9 From Outer Space was a film where the strings holding the flying saucers were clearly visible and where a shower curtain was used to represent the door into an airplane’s cockpit. On the other hand, it was also a very sincere plea for world peace and a lament that humans would rather blow themselves up with Solarnite than work out their differences.

Or you take a film like 1953‘s Glen or Glenda. Ed Wood, who identified as a heterosexual and who was considered, by his friends, to be quite a womanizer (and it should be noted that young Ed Wood was strikingly handsome, though he was subsequently very badly aged by alcoholism and homelessness), also preferred to wear clothing designed for women and was open about it at a time when American culture was even more conformist-minded than usual. In Glen or Glenda, Wood plays the autobiographical role of Glen, who struggles to tell his fiancée (played by Wood’s real-life girlfriend, Delores Fuller) that he dreams of being able to wear her angora sweater. Glen’s story is told by a psychiatrist (Timothy Farrell) who is talking to a cop (veteran Hollywood character actor Lyle Talbot) who is investigating the death of a transvestite. Among other things, Glen or Glenda is known for its bad acting, stiffly delivered dialogue, and its occasional digressions about why men go bald while women do not. (It’s the tight-fitting hats, which cut-off blood flow to the head and not only cause men to lose their hair but also develop the Solarnite bomb.) But, at the same time, it’s a film in which Wood attempts to handle, with sensitivity and empathy, a subject that most films in the 50s would have either ridiculed or portrayed as being a threat to the American way of life. All of Wood’s films are sympathetic to those who are considered to be outsiders by conventional society. This is especially true of Glen or Glenda.

Of course, Glen or Glenda is also known for Bela Lugosi randomly appearing in a laboratory and shouting things like, “Pull ze string! Pull ze string!” As far as I can tell, Lugosi is supposed to be playing the creator, who is not portrayed as being a stereotypical God but instead as being a mad scientist who rants and raves in his library and his laboratory. And while it’s obvious that Bela was probably added to the film at the last minute and, more or less, allowed to do whatever the Hell he wanted, his presence adds a wonderfully bizarre touch to film’s dry style. (I would compare him to the mysterious burned man who appears at the start of David Lynch’s Eraserhead.) Whenever the film starts to get a bit too much like an educational film, Lugosi pops up and starts to literally shout at the audiences, frantically issuing a bunch of commands and nursery school rhymes that don’t really made any sense. It reminds one of H.P. Lovecraft’s insistence that the universe was created by a blind idiot God who had no idea that he was actually creating anything. The presence of Lugosi and a lengthy and increasingly surreal dream sequence in which Glen imagines himself being tormented by both his fiancée and the devil all suggest that, under different circumstances, Ed Wood could have been the American Buñuel.

Sadly, it was not to be. Ed Wood died in alcoholic poverty and was reportedly pretty miserable during the final years of his life. There was nothing pleasant about the end of Wood’s life. But, on his birthday, I think the least we can do is remove the title of “worst director” from his legacy. He was nothing of the sort.

Previous Icarus Files:

Horror on the Lens: Night of the Ghouls (dir by Edward D. Wood, Jr.)

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today we celebrate Ed Wood’s 100th birthday with his sequel to Bride of the Monsters. In Night of the Ghouls, con man Dr. Alcula (Kenne Duncan) moves into Bela Lugosi’s old mansion and pretends to talk to the dead. What Alcula doesn’t realize is that the house is actually haunted (by Tor Johnson’s Lobo, among others) and real ghosts don’t appreciate pretend ghosts.

What can you say about a film like of Night of the Ghouls? It’s an Ed Wood film, with all that suggests. However, how can you resist a film that starts with Criswell sitting up in his coffin and providing commentary?

The role of Dr. Alcula was originally written for Bela Lugosi. After Lugosi’s death, veteran actor and longtime Wood friend Kenne Duncan got the role instead. Also of note, Wood appears twice in this film. Not only does his picture appear on a wanted poster in the police station but Wood also plays one of the ghouls.

October Positivity: Past Shadows (dir by Peter J. Eaton)

Posted on October 9, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

When this 2021 film started, I noticed that the only immediately familiar name in the opening credits was Corbin Bernsen, who was the third-billed member of the cast. Bernsen’s presence in the film did not surprise me. Bernsen has appeared in several faith-based films and he’s even directed a few.

What did surprise me was just how briefly Bernsen’s appearance actually waas. It’s a blink-and-you’ll miss it appearance and, unless I somehow missed it, I don’t think he actually has a line of dialogue in the film. He plays the uncle of one of the film’s main characters. He’s an archeologist and, whenever he finds any ancient glass at the site of any of his digs, he sends it to his nephew. The nephew eventually decides to put all that glass to good use by taping it all together and using it as the frames for his previously frameless glasses. Suddenly, whenever he puts on the glasses, he can see the past!

That’s good because one of his professors has felt guilty ever since his grandson was kidnapped. So now, he can just put on the glasses and see who did the abducting. Yay! However, another professor — a physicist — wants the glasses for himself so he drugs our hero and steals the glasses. Luckily, everything works out in the end. Bad professor goes to jail. Good professor stops drinking and is reunited with his family. And the guy with the glasses gets a recording contract in Nashville.

I guess the glasses are meant to represent faith. And the bad scientist is meant to represent everyone who says that science is more important than faith. I’m not sure that glasses that allow you to see into the past is the best way sell the idea of faith. I mean, if you’re so inclined, I guess you could spend as much time as you want praying for a pair of magic glasses that will allow you to see into the past but, at some point, you’re going to have to admit that there’s no such thing as magic glasses, no matter how much you want to believe in them. In this case, the scientist laughing at you would be proven right.

I had another thought while watching this film. A good sound mix is really important. If you want people to get anything out of your movie, it’s important that they be able to hear what your characters are saying. It’s important that the characters actually sound like they’re all in the same room as opposed to just standing in a booth and reading their lines off a piece of paper. The sound was all over the place. Sometimes, I had to strain to hear everything. Sometimes, I winced because the movie was too loud. Considering how talky this film is and how often the action segues into flashback, this movie needed a much cleaner sound to it. There’s more to making a good film than focusing the image, though this film struggled with that as well.

Anyway, the most interesting thing about this film is Corbin Bernsen showing up for 2 minutes and not saying anything. Has Bernsen become the poor man’s Eric Roberts?

Late Night Retro Television Review: Monsters 2.17 “One Wolf’s Family”

Posted on October 9, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on YouTube.

This week, Jerry Stiller is a werewolf!

Episode 2.17 “One Wolf’s Family”

(Dir by Alex Zamm, originally aired on February 11th, 1990)

In this rather heavy-handed episode of Monsters, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara star as Victor and Greta, two immigrants who have built a successful life for themselves in America. Victor is very proud of his heritage and his success. He’s even more proud of the fact that he and Greta are pure-bred werewolves. He expects his daughter, Anya (Amy Stiller), to marry a purebred werewolf.

(Ben was apparently busy when they shot this episode.)

So, how will Victor react when he discovers that Amy’s fiancé, Stanley (Robert Clohessy), is a were-hyena!?

*sigh*

Okay, I will give some credit here. The scene where Victor meets Stanley and they all gather around the kitchen table for dinner does have some funny moments. Stanley, being a hyena in human form, cannot stop laughing, even when he’s being insulted. And when Jerry Stiller launches into a rant about how no daughter of his is going to hang out on the roadside and eat trash, I did laugh. This was largely due to Jerry Stiller’s delivery of the line. Jerry Stiller was always funny whenever he started to rant.

Otherwise, this episode was pretty disappointing. There’s a subplot about a nosey neighbor named Agnes (Karen Shallo). Agnes is upset to discover that her neighbors are werewolves that keep dead bodies in their refrigerator so that they’ll have something to snack on. “It’s bad enough that they’re immigrants!” Agnes says. And yes, I get it. Agnes is supposed to be a small-minded suburbanite who doesn’t understand that America is a country of immigrants and all the rest. The problem is that, regardless of how Agnes feels about immigrants, she has every right to be concerned about living next door to a werewolf who keeps a dead body in his refrigerator. When she sees Victor eating a foot, it totally makes sense that she would be upset about it. The show’s satire would have worked if Agnes’s sole objection to them had been that they were immigrants. (It would have been even funnier if Agnes has absolutely no problem living next door to werewolves as long as they were born in America.) But by making them werewolves and having Agnes be upset by the fact that they were werewolves, the show instead suggests that Agnes might have a point.

Not that it matters. Stanley turns into a hyena and rips off Agnes’s head and brings it to Victor and Greta as a gift. Stanley is accepted into the family while Jerry Stiller howls a the moon.

Political satire is always hit-and-miss and this episode was definitely a mess. It’s a shame because Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara were definitely funny people. (If you’ve ever seen the documentary Have A Good Trip, there’s a scene where Ben Stiller tells a story about accidentally taking several tabs of LSD in college and, in a panic, calling his father for help. “I know what you’re going through,” Jerry told him, “I once smoked an entire Pall Mall cigarette.” “My father was Jerry Stiller, not Jerry Rubin,” Ben explains.) This is one of those episodes that I was really hoping would be good but it just didn’t work.

Horror On TV: One Step Beyond 2.1 “Delusion” (dir by John Newland)

Posted on October 9, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

On tonight’s episode of One Step Beyond.…

A young woman (Suzanne Pleshette) desperately needs a blood transfusion. Fortunately, the police have managed to track down one of the only people to share her blood type, an accountant named Harold Stern (Norman Lloyd). Harold seems like a nice, rather mild-mannered guy and he has a long history of donating blood. However, when the police approach him, Harold refuses to donate.

“What type of crumb are you!?” the police demand.

Harold explains that, whenever he gives someone blood, he develops a psychic connection with that person. He can see their future. And that’s simply a burden that he can no longer shoulder….

This episode of One Step Beyond originally aired on September 15th, 1959. Norman Lloyd, who plays Harold, got his start as a member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater and he also played the villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur. (Speaking of Hitchcock, Suzanne Pleshette played the doomed school teacher in The Birds.) When Lloyd appeared in this episode of One Step Beyond, he was 44 years old. He would go on to live for another 62 years, making his final film appearance at the age of 101!

Book Review: Revolution In The Head by Ian MacDonald

Posted on October 9, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Since today would have been the 84th birthday of John Lennon, I want to take a minute to recommend a book called Revolution In The Head.

First published in 1994 and subsequently revised two more times, Revolution In The Head is both a chronological history of the songs that the Beatles recorded and a cultural history of the 60s. By examining the recording of each song, Ian MacDonald not only describes how each song reflects (or doesn’t reflect) what was happening in the group at the time but also how the Beatles’s changing sound reflected what was happening in the world at the time. Author Ian MacDonald was clearly a Beatles fan but, more importantly, he was not an apologist and, in the book, he’s just as quick to criticize as he is to praise. While he praises the majority of the band’s recordings, there’s more than a few that he totally dismisses. It’s a well-researched and passionately argued book, one that makes interesting reading for both fans of the group and history nerds like myself.

As for the Beatles themselves, they come across as fully developed people. MacDonald neither idealizes nor demonizes the group and instead focuses on the idea of them as working musicians who usually collaborated well together as a group but sometimes feared and resented that they were losing their individual identities. Neither Lennon nor Paul McCartney are presented as being saints and MacDonald doesn’t shy away from showing how frayed their relationship had become by the time the group split up. (They’re portrayed as developing a classic love/hate relationship with each other.) But both are also presented as being talented artists who were capable of creating beautiful music that would survive the test of time. For all the conflict and for all the times that Lennon complained about McCartney’s commercial sensibilities and for all the times that McCartney complained that Lennon was not committed to keeping the Beatles going, they were still capable of creating songs like Eleanor Rigby and A Day In The Life.

A lot of Beatles fans will probably disagree with MacDonald’s opinions. He’s surprisingly dismissive of a lot of George Harrison’s songs, including the wonderful While My Guitar Gently Weeps. But that’s okay! There’s nothing wrong with having differing opinions. It’s actually a good thing.

Horror on the Lens: Bride of the Monster (dir by Edward D. Wood, Jr.)

Posted on October 9, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Bride of The Monster (1955, dir by Ed Wood)

Since tomorrow will be the great man’s birthday, it seems appropriate that today’s horror film on the lens is Edward D. Wood’s 1955 epic, Bride of the Monster.

(Much like Plan 9 From Outer Space, around here, it is a tradition to watch Bride of the Monster in October.)

The film itself doesn’t feature a bride but it does feature a monster, a giant octopus who guards the mansion of the mysterious Dr. Vornoff (Bela Lugosi). Vornoff and his hulking henchman Lobo (Tor Johnson) have been kidnapping men and using nuclear power to try to create a race of super soldiers. Or something like that. The plot has a make-it-up-as-you-go-along feel to it. That’s actually a huge part of the film’s appeal.

Bride of the Monster is regularly described as being one of the worst films ever made but I think that’s rather unfair. Appearing in his last speaking role, Lugosi actually gives a pretty good performance, bringing a wounded dignity to the role of Vornoff. If judged solely against other movies directed by Ed Wood, this is actually one of the best films ever made.

(For a longer review, click here!)