Buzzing Thru the Pylon: Halloween Free-For-All, Pt. 4: Midnight Matinees

OK, so I treated myself. Halloween rolls around, and I get all crazy with the DVD buying. Specifically, horror and science fiction movie buying. You may have noticed already from the fact that this post is Part 4 of my Halloween Free-For-All, with at least three more posts in sight.

Here's the deal: Amazon often has a big horror movie sale on their site at this time of the year, and for once, I was prepared. Instead of going for the bigger ticket items which are often on some form of sale throughout the year anyway, I decided to jump into their pile of 5.99 or less DVDs, and see what I could roust out of there. The first things that popped out at me were a quartet of discs from MGM's (and occasionally, 20th Century Fox's) ongoing (and seemingly popular, at least with psychotronic freaks like me) Midnight Movies series. A few years back, I grabbed about a dozen of these discs from Wal-Mart for 5 bucks a shot, finishing off my Corman Poe collection in the process. Now, it's a similar situation on Amazon: only about $20, and I have eight more films in my collection, two of which I actively like, another two which are so innocently bad they just cannot be missed, four of which I have never seen, and three of those four never-seens are ones which I have always wanted to watch. So, I can't really lose on any front with these selections, and they are going to make for some interesting viewing over the next week. The discs:

20th Century Fox and MGM Present(s) Midnite Movies Double Features
Disc #1
Panic in Year Zero! (1962)
Director: Ray Milland AIP, 1:33, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: haven’t seen yet

The Last Man on Earth (1964)
Director: Ubaldo Ragona & Sidney Salkow
API/AIP, 1:26, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

First, a Ray Milland film of which I have heard a good deal -- some decent, some moderately ill -- but given that I am a huge Milland nut (I will not rest until It Happens Every Spring, my favorite baseball movie, is on disc), I figured that I just have to own a movie that the man himself directed. Post-apocalypse, here we come -- at least, before our government's rapture nuts take us there. Also hanging out in that time after decent civilization has finally gotten out of its own hair is Vincent Price in the first film version of the awesome I Am Legend, The Last Man on Earth. Like all three film versions, this one is not quite the novel, but for a neo-zombie flick with the great Price, it ain't hay. And while I have yet to watch this disc, it just has to hold a better print, coming from a major studio like MGM, than the umpteen versions of this public domain flick bopping about on cheap, fly-by-night video companies (or on the internet for free). I'm hoping to discover that I will like it all the more without all of the pops, crackles and erratic cuts. Then again, it could backfire and ruin the atmosphere.

Disc #2
A Blueprint for Murder (1953)
Director: Andrew L. Stone
20th Century Fox, 1:17, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: haven’t seen yet

Man in the Attic (1953)
Director: Hugo Fregonese
20th Century Fox, 1:22, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

For fans of mysteries or psycho killers or both, Man in the Attic has just got to be seen for a terrific performance by a young but always edgy Jack Palance as a serial killing pathologist named Slade, who rents a room from Andy Griffith's Aunt Bea (no joke) -- ala The Lodger, a relationship noted in the credits -- and then proceeds to murder showgirls all over London. Low-budget but very tense mood, lots of sleazy girls in heels and stockings, and a maniacal Palance -- why would one miss this? I caught up with it recently on TCM, and had a good, gritty time watching it. I have not seen A Blueprint for Murder, which came out the same year as Man in the Attic, but it gives me an opportunity to see Joseph Cotten, always a favorite of mine, working his magic away from Hitchcock and Welles. I don't really know much else about it, but I am looking forward to it all the same.

Disc #3
Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (1955)
Director: Dan Milner
Milner Bros./ARC, 1:20, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: 3

The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955)
Director: David Kramarsky & Lou Price
San Mateo/ARC, 1:15, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: 2

Boy, are these a pair of really crappy films. Bottom of the barrel sludge, both of them, and as far as I know, both floating about in the public domain. I own Phantom on one such disc (one of those "50 movies for 12 bucks" things), and while I really don't need to own it a second time, I do have a thing for mutant sea creatures, so having an actual widescreen print of Phantom made the decision for me. And this monster is such a dopey sad sack that you almost want to cuddle it, even when he is attacking girls in bikinis.

There is no actual creature with a million eyes in Beast, not even a dopey one, and if you go in waiting for such a creature like I did, there will only be sad disappointment. Thank goodness I'm not an ophthalmologist. However, if you are interested in seeing just how absurdly boring a film with such a title can actually turn out to be, this will be your cup of tea. It's like someone fed the Cleavers or the Nelsons downers and then followed them around with cameras, all the while making them believe that aliens are out to get them. Despite the fear factor, everyone still practically walks around in a stupor, making this one just drip, drip, drip along... and yet, I find it fascinating that someone would even release this. And now, because my taste for these things is set extremely low, and because I am a rubbernecker of the old school, I own this slow-motion trainwreck.

Disc #4
The Return of Dracula (1958)
Director: Paul Landres
Gramercy/United Artists, 1:17, b/w (partial color)
Cinema 4 Rating: haven’t seen yet

The Vampire (1957)

Director: Paul Landres Gramercy/United Artists, 1:15, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: haven’t seen yet

OK, I have no doubt that these two are going to end up seeming supremely disappointing to me, but I am looking forward to watching them all the same. A pair of Paul Landres-directed films that I have never run into through all of my video travels, but have read plenty about in numerous horror movie texts. Even the texts lead me to not expect too much, but I can't help but get excited about even the worst or even just plain boring films when they have been so hidden from me all this time. Obscure plays HUGE with me, and ultimately, for me, sometimes the experience means more than the actual outcome of the experience.

So it is with all four films on these discs that I have not seen. It means that instead of watching the same two dozen films on TCM or AMC for the Halloween weekend, I will have a stockpile of undiscovered treasures at my fingertips. Treasures, no matter their quality. As I said, it's the experience. Sometimes you just have to take a cinematic Cleveland Steamer to the chest to get your senses straight and your movie sights re-calibrated.

Buzzing Thru the Pylon: Growling at Best Buy's Exclusivity...

Warner Home Video Sci-Fi Double Features
Disc #1
Moon Zero Two (1969)
Director: Roy Ward Baker
Cinema 4 Rating: 4

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)
Director/Writer: Val Guest
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

Disc #2
Battle Beneath the Earth (1967)
DirectorMontgomery Tully
Cinema 4 Rating: 3

The Ultimate Warrior (1975)
Director/Writer: Robert Clouse
Cinema 4 Rating: 5

Disc #3
World Without End (1956)
Director/Writer: Edward Bernds
Cinema 4 Rating: 5

Satellite in the Sky (1956)
Director: Paul Dickson
Cinema 4 Rating: 4

Quite regularly, I sift through a seemingly endless list of titles which I am hoping will get released onto DVD so I can replace old versions of these same films. Most of these films were taped off of cable television anytime in the past twenty to five years, though a certain number of them were prerecorded version officially released by their respective studios. No matter how I might have them in my collection, it is still my fervent hope that they shall be released onto disc form, and thus save space in our crammed little hovel (it's amazing the space saved when comparing discs versus tapes) and also, the hope remains that the print in which they are burned onto disc will far outweigh my previous versions in overall quality.

One of the films on this list, which I began compiling a full decade ago, was Hammer Films' special effects-heavy follow-up to One Million Years B.C., When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.

Every couple of months since I moved down here to Cali, I have gone through most of this list, and one of the first films I always look up is When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. Not that it is any great shakes as a film per se, but it is highly sought by fans of stop-motion animation for its exquisite dinosaur footage by Jim Danforth and Roger Dicken. (While I am at it, I should mention that David Allen, amongst others, also worked on the effects as an assistant, though only Danforth and Dicken were actually nominated for an Oscar at the 1972 awards.) It is for this reason alone (OK, the cave girls play a part too) that I embraced the film as a teenager, and made sure to grab a copy on VHS when it came out in the '90s. And this is without knowing that the original story for the film was devised by none other than J.G. Ballard, writer of Crash (the wonderfully twisted and kinky Cronenberg one) and Empire of the Sun.

But I had always heard there was a slightly longer version of the film, one that took the cavegirl stuff even further than when Raquel Welch leaped about in a fur bikini in B.C. Supposedly, the film originally held a handful (more than a handful, as they say, is a waste) of topless shots, both innocent (swimming about in mucky, sea monster-infested waters) and randy (mild cavepeople whoopee, apparently), as well as a scene where lead Playboy bunny/"actress" Victoria Vetri gets stripped down in a cave (appropriately) by her would-be cave beau. Gee, I'm was actually only here for the dinosaurs, but I can you heap some of this, too, on my plate? All the more reason to remain impatient over an official special edition.

And yet, I could never find this one, even while the entire Harryhausen oeuvre and much of the Hammer library had been released already. I felt certain that it was bound to come out sooner or later, because if there is one diehard fanbase out there, it's the one for special effects epics -- dinosaurs, spaceships, aliens, or what have you. But, as I kept checking over the last few years to find news of its arrival on DVD, I found nothing. My searches came up empty, over and over again. And then, the other day, I found out why: I had been primarily looking on Amazon.

Cut to last week, as I decided to take a quick first look at the new neighborhood Best Buy store. There, sitting in plain sight on a shelf in the science-fiction DVD section, was a single copy of a Warner Home Video Sci-Fi Double Feature disc holding, of course, two movies. The first was of no real consequence to me, though I had seen it years earlier: Moon Zero Two, often described (self-described, really) as the "first space western." But who could care when the other film on the disc was When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth? After the usual shake of the head and pinch of the skin to clear things up for me in as cartoonish a way as possible, I grabbed the copy and refused to let go of it until I arrived home.

I didn't get a chance to watch the film until yesterday, but in the meantime, mostly out of consternation over how I discovered the disc, I went online to research it once more, knowing full well I had been on Amazon just a couple of months prior and had seen nothing on WDRTE. It turns out there is now an entry for it on the site, but it is for an outside party trying to make some cash selling "used/new" copies of the disc. And in the description? The words "Best Buy Exclusive."

This is not the first time I have come at odds with this "Best Buy Exclusive" scenario. I also did this for years looking for Ernest B. Schoedsack's sweet 1940 mad science thriller Dr. Cyclops (the absolute inspiration for The Krofft Supershow's Dr. Shrinker, a crappie but fun show from my youth). I had the Universal VHS release, but was hoping for it on DVD, to accompany the rest of my Cooper and Schoedsack DVD library. Then I found out that Best Buy had been selling it for months as an exclusive set with several other prime golden age horror and sci-fi flicks, including two more on my list, The Land Unknown and The Deadly Mantis. A rush to Best Buy found me a copy all right, but the fact that it said "Volume 2" on it meant that there was an entire first volume of five possible films that I didn't have, and I finally procured a copy off of someone on Amazon for about fifteen bucks over retail in new condition. Which is how I landed The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Mole People and Tarantula in my DVD collection, after years of frustration, and also how my ire was first raised over these exclusive deals with Best Buy.

This wouldn't be a problem with me if they would do a general release a few months later, but from what I can gather from some movie boards is that there is a group of people who rush out and buy up every copy of these exclusives just so they can sell them later to needy, hungry fans once the discs go out of print. It's ticket-scalping without the tickets, I guess -- if you really want to see the movie, you are going to have to pay the price. As proof of this, another "exclusive," a set of generally low-grade horror thrillers thrown into a box called the Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive, is already selling for far above what I would be willing to pay for it (example: click here). Even though the undiscerning horror fan in me (which is the same one that embraces even the truly terrible films on the discs discussed above) would love to add those films to my overall collection, I already own four of them on tape, and none of them are truly essential by any means.

None of the six films in the three discs I did discover at Best Buy as exclusives last week were really essential to me either... except for the Hammer cave girls and dinosaurs epic. Truthfully, I could have saved the money on the other two discs, though I really did love Yul Brynner's The Ultimate Warrior as a kid, and also watched Battle Beneath the Earth lo those many years ago on that beloved after school sci-fi matinee show on KTVA. The upside is that I will be replacing five different tapes in my collection with these three discs (Satellite in the Sky is the only one of the six I did not previously own), and the purchase does give me widescreen versions of all of these films, which is a great addition to the collection too.

And now I have the apparently uncut version of WDRTE. Yes, the disc does say it is rated "G" on the case and shows a running time of 96 minutes. Watching it, you get at least some PG nudity antics and 100 minutes of cave girls tumbling about the animated dinosaur attacks. I found a few entries online talking about Warner recalling this disc from the Best Buy stores, but also some entries offering up different versions of the confusion from various locations. Who knows why it was recalled? My disc works, Vetri doffs her clothes, I couldn't care less about film ratings anyway (I am an adult, can watch anything I damn well please, don't believe in censorship at all, and do not pay attention to ratings or the bluenoses who maintain them), and everything is peachy keen once again in my universe...

...until I remember to ask: Where the hell is Roogie's Bump? Or It Happens Every Spring? Damn it...