Lima

Poster tagline: HER HONEYMOON TURNED INTO A NIGHTMARE OF HORROR!!! The synopsis has the sweet touch of proper B-movie horror: in the middle of their honeymoon, a man suddenly leaves his wife. She searches for him all over the country until she tracks him down in the deep south, at his parents' estate, in the middle of an inhospitable swamp, where the cruel truth is revealed: her newlywed husband, after some scientific experiments, is gradually turning into....crocodile!! Enjoying this horror film requires three things: you like talky dramas where you are forced to wait two thirds of the way through for the first major thrill. You don't think it's outright stupid that the main character crosses a swampy landscape with eye-catching models of crocodiles just slapping their jaws in the air. And last but not least, you are tolerant of the naive make up effects of the time. Then you will enjoy this horror flick, solidly produced, with a higher budget and realistic sets of a swamp landscape. The Alligator People really doesn’t deserve the 35% average it has now.

Poster tagline: THE BIGGEST THING SINCE TIME BEGAN!! The British low-budget answer, or rather rip-off, to the 6 years older classic The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Plot-wise, it’s exactly the same, but what else can you come up with in the tried and tested “radioactive monster has awakened and is attacking a city” kind of plot? The filmmaking itself, on the other hand, it’s lacking. While the stop-motion animation of the titular monster can be proudly compared to Harryhausen's Rhedosaurus (though much underused given the overall runtime), the special effects overall, though newer, fall far short. Behemoth's attack on the transport ferry in particular must have looked stupid even at the time, it looks like a small child playing rubber toys in a bathtub and bumping them into each other. Interesting in comparison is the moderate British approach, where they make do with a lightly equipped militia and one mini-submarine to fight the lizard, while the Americans would deploy a whole fleet armed to the teeth, supported by air. Although it's no horror masterpiece, I was surprised to find that even nowadays Behemoth has a certain place in the programmes of some British TV stations.

Poster tagline: BEWARE THE TRIFFIDS... they grow... know... walk... talk... stalk... and KILL!! To bemoan the fact that an old monster-horror film from the naive 'Golden Age of Science Fiction of the 50s and 60s' neutered John Wyndham's novel is like mocking Steven Seagal for never playing Hamlet. It's just completely pointless and counterproductive. Even in modest conditions, when they didn't have a rich studio like Universal behind them, the Brits managed to make a cheap horror film that looks more expensive than it really was, and even though some of the FX scenes have aged a lot (the plane crash), it's not a total bust. The triffids' costumes are quite fine for their time and the ending in the lighthouse tower builds up nicely. Perhaps the assistant directorial supervision of Hammer legend Freddie Francis, whose name did not appear in the credits, also contributed to the quite acceptable result.

Poster tagline: ALL NEW UNDERWATER THRILLS!!! TERROR – STALKS THE CITY’S STREETS!! Of course, it doesn't reach the qualities of Creature from The Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature by the legendary Jack Arnold, but it doesn't chew on what has already been chewed on and goes its own way. This is especially the idea of Gill-Man's gradual transformation into an Ichthyosapiense, an intermediate stage between a frog-man and a human, when, due to deep burns, Gill-Man loses the ability to use his gills and is dependent only on his lungs, thus becoming useless for underwater life. There are also the already proven attractive underwater shots, often used in the first half, when Gill-Man is played by then diving champion Ricou Browning, of course dressed in a believable costume. In order to prevent the storyline from turning into a dull plot (already successfully used in the first part) in the form of the hunt for the monster-capture-escape of the monster timeline, the creators spiced it up with a somewhat trite love melodrama of the main characters, which leads to a tragic end. The final minutes, leading up to the inevitable suicide, are perhaps the most emotional moment of the entire series.

Poster tagline: HUMAN EMOTIONS STRIPPED RAW!!! ATTACKED BY A CREATURE OF HELL!!! Corman's early films, narratively speaking, look – how shall I put it – rather daft. The atomic "destruction of humanity" is portrayed by one shot of a destroyed house, and the post-apocalyptic atmosphere is evoked by a few puffs of artificial smoke floating in a few shots over the landscape around the house. This is where the vast majority of the action takes place, with a disparate group of seven survivors that their unwritten leader has jokingly called "the hope for a new human race". If Corman adhered to the unwritten rule that "we are most afraid of what we can't see", it doesn't really work here. Those few hints with a detail on the tentacle of the monster with long claws don't cause much terror and until about 10 minutes before the end, it’s a rather lengthy wait, when the most that can break the viewer's lethargy is the dashing girlfriend of the villain and her dancing in front of a gramophone, plus some terrible dialogues. By the way, the monster, and it sounds almost unbelievable, it’s represented – according to the drawings of one of the characters – by a radioactive mutated North American chipmunk squirrel, but it looks like a scarecrow from a children's carnival. It has a stocky human figure, a thick makeup of modurite on its head, with two horns and pointed ears impaled into it. It's not scary at all, but it's just a blast to watch :o)

True Blood suffered the same fate as Heroes: clutter. The first season was excellent, both the world of humans and the world of vampires respected the rules of logic, were clearly defined and their intersection was interesting and attractive. Just like its main characters, whether it was the dignified vampire Bill, the over-the-top Lafayette, the sex-addicted Jason Stackhouse, or the macho sheriff Bellefleur. Season 2 and 3 still continued in a more or less tolerable trend, with the latter adding the funniest character of the whole series: the loquacious vampire Russell Edgington. But starting with season 4, the team around Alan Ball completely lost the plot and flooded the show's world with bizarre, nonsensical storylines with even more bizarre characters, as if they were trying to fill the 600 minutes of one season and didn't know which way to go. And they made quite a mess of it. So after all the shapeshifters, panthers, plasma-beam fairies, voodoo monsters, witches, fire spirits, and vampire castes, I was just waiting for aliens to show up, or a bloodthirsty Godzilla to come out of nowhere. During season 5, in the scene where the ghost in the form of a fire golem was chasing the cook Terry, I asked myself why am I still watching this weird crap, and reached for the DELETE button deliberately and with gusto.

Everyone is welcome, even die-hard puritans, among whom I fortunately do not count myself. Knowing nothing about the film, after reading a brief outline of the plot, I wondered what kind of stuff could come out of it and whether I was in for some shallow, prissy shenanigans, but I was wrong! This is thoroughly enjoyable and tasteful entertainment that does not underestimate the intelligence of its viewer. It lightly and interestingly sketches the period realities and women's awakening struggle for their rights, with the history of the vibrator as a funny bonus. Objectively, it would be about 4*, but for the positive feeling it gave me, I'll rate it slightly higher. Unassuming little gems like this deserve support.

The only thing that impresses me about this thing is the honest craftsmanship of all the sets and interiors (especially noticeable with the deadly swamp and the giant spider web) that go hand in hand with simple special effects that feel more lifelike than today's digital atrocities. Otherwise, though, it is more evident than ever that there is a thin line between fantasy and phantasmagoria, which the creators crossed with gusto. The script resembles the work of a ten-year-old boy with an overactive imagination, who throws in everything that comes to their mind. The clutter is so evident that it ends up being tiring. All that's left is the hilarious discovery of the insignificant supporting roles Liam Neeson played in his acting beginnings.

Poster tagline: ADVENTURES BEYOND THE LIMITS OF IMAGINATION in….DYNAMATION!!! THRILL TO THE SEVEN WONDERS OF THE MOON WORLD!!! Nice. In the first half (set in 1899 somewhere in Britain) the film deceives as it delivers plenty of humour, albeit somewhat infantile and forced, through the absent-minded inventor Cavor. This changes radically in the rest of the film, after reaching the surface of the moon, where a more serious note is struck when Cavor, as an unwilling emissary of humanity, confesses to the Moon King the horrors of war that have accompanied the history of planet Earth. But the main character here is not Cavor, or his assistant, or his assistant's girlfriend, but visual effects wizard Ray Harryhausen and his stop-motion figures and camera tricks. The epic proportions of the lunar underground city, the giant carnivorous caterpillar, the moonmen themselves with their fly-eyes and elongated insect-like snouts, and last but not least the cute space bathyscaphe in the form of an iron ball – all this will delight the eye of anyone who admires Harryhausen's work. The only disappointment is the quick ending, which fizzles out into nothing, as if the filmmakers had run out of ideas and money.

Poster tagline: AN UNSPEAKABLE HORROR! DESTROYING AND TERRIFYING! This is just bad. I don't think Roger Corman (here as executive producer) brags about this film to his grandchildren. The title promises a B-horror ride, but the alien, endowed with more than a million senses, makes its first appearance in the last seconds of the film, in a form reminiscent of the lazy peek of my hamster when she looks from the opening of her bed what kind of grain I've put in her bowl. The spaceship in which the alien lives and uses radio waves to control the minds of the surrounding animals and humans (in real life, a farming family and their weird neighbour) is located somewhere in the Texas desert and looks like a food processor. There’s a rabid dog barking at the camera and, just in case, we have plush ravens thrown at the camera playing hostile birds. The performances are appropriate to the level of this cinematic dreck: listless and uninvolved. The only one who’s alive it at least a little bit is Chester Conklin, whose exaggerated gestures let us know who was THE star of silent films in the old days.