ALLIGATOR was a fun entry in the cycle of nature-fights-back movies triggered by the success of JAWS. This humorous horror flick was directed by Lewis (CUJO) Teague, wittily written by John (PIRANHA) Sayles and starred Robert (DRAGON WARS) Forster, Henry Silva and Robin Riker.
There were a lot of different ALLIGATOR posters produced internationally, so I thought I’d post some of them here…
And, finally, here’s a B&W newspaper ad…
Whilst attending a Christmas feast in Camelot with his uncle King Arthur, Gawain (Dev Patel) accepts a challenge made by a Green Knight who enters Arthur’s court on horseback.
This challenge involves Gawain landing a blow on the Green Knight, so Arthur hands Gawain his sword Excalibur and he beheads the mysterious knight. But this does not kill the plant-like being, who rides off (holding his severed head in his hand) to await Gawain, who must travel to the knight’s Green Chapel the following Christmas and receive an equal blow in return…
One can appreciate colourblind casting, which increases opportunities for actors of colour, though as this film’s narrative doesn’t really embrace Dev Patel’s ethnicity or integrate it into the character, the casting decision probably leaves some viewers wondering how come King Arthur’s nephew happens to be played by an English-born son of Indian Hindus. That said, I think Patel is really good in this movie: he conveys a lot via his eyes and expressions, rather than dialogue.
Adapted from the 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the film looks wonderful, with some impressive Irish landscapes and buildings. Director David (PETE’S DRAGON) Lowery, who was also the writer, purposefully goes out of his way to make the film enigmatic and dreamlike, though the finished production ends up being an interesting, unusual film, rather than a truly compelling one, I think.
Novel moments include Gawain’s encounter with a group of naked, hairless giants and the scene where he helps a murdered woman ghost (Erin Kellyman) find closure by recovering her skull from the pond outside her home. There’s also a friendly fox that eventually talks to Gawain.
At one point, when Gawain is left tied-up in a forest, the camera does a 360-degree pan, ending with a shot of Gawain’s withered corpse, as if to say that one way this story could end is with the protagonist failing to free himself and dying amongst the trees. The camera then does another 360-degree pan and ends with a shot of the still-alive Gawain, who, this time, manages to free himself from his bonds. I don’t know why, but this moment really sticks in my memory.
The Green Knight himself looks impressive, with a living wooden visage resembling the design of a ‘Green Man’ foliate head carving. Played by Ralph Ineson wearing prosthetics designed by Barry Gower, the Green Knight in this film is a big improvement on the same mythical character, played by Sean Connery, in SWORD OF THE VALIANT: THE LEGEND OF SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT (1984).
The part that I think is really effective comes near the very end of the movie, where it seems Gawain flees the Green Knight, goes back to Camelot, is knighted and eventually becomes king. He has a son by commoner Essel (Alicia Vikander) but he abandons her and takes the child, who grows up and dies of wounds on a battlefield. Gawain marries a noblewoman, has a child by his wife and, many years later, we see him become an unpopular king. After his castle comes under siege and his family abandons him, Gawain removes a magic green girdle he has worn throughout these scenes and his head falls from his body, to the ground… and Gawain realises this compelling sequence has all been a vision: he is still kneeling on the ground in the Green Chapel, waiting for the Green Knight to strike his blow. This whole sequence is wordless and really well done.
With a purposefully ambiguous fate for the hero, THE GREEN KNIGHT perhaps tries too hard to be a non-heroic yarn, with a leisurely pace, Arthur portrayed as a quite sickly man (played well by Sean Harris) and Gawain shown to be a pretty reactive protagonist – but the film boasts some impressive visuals, a striking score and undeniably has its own special atmosphere.
A behind the scenes shot…
A warrior (Christopher Rygh) mounts the heads of the monsters he has killed on the wall of his meagre home.
To recover from his monster fights, the warrior uses jars of noxious liquid to heal his wounds after each of battle…
…but when a window shutter knocks over a jar and some of the restorative liquid seeps onto the head of the latest creature he has killed… the monster’s head becomes reanimated, and so the warrior must hunt it down.
THE HEAD HUNTER (aka VIKING VENGEANCE) was directed, co-written, produced and edited by Jordan (THANKSKILLING) Downey, who cleverly came up with a story that could be done on a low budget: basically there’s one character (plus a girl playing the daughter in some flashbacks) and a bunch of heads (we are never shown the monster fights themselves).
Some of the background secondary heads on the warrior’s wall are barely more realistic than latex halloween masks, but most of the creature heads are decently-made considering the budget.
Some sword and sorcery fans find this film too small scale. After all, the story does revolve around just one warrior fighting monsters in battles that remain off camera. But I enjoyed this tightly-budgeted movie and I think the warrior’s armour looks pretty damn cool.
At one point the project was named THE HEAD. Artist Christopher Shy, from Studio Ronin, created a couple of wonderful posters which used that particular title…
The bottom line is that I would certainly like to see Downey get the chance to direct a bigger-scale fantasy-horror flick.
Okay, one more look at one of the decapitated creature heads…
Finally, here’s a gorgeous alternative movie poster created by illustrator Vance Kelly. Wow! This really makes me hope the filmmakers one day get to make a larger-scale, more expansive film about the Head Hunter’s fantasy world…
SCARS OF DRACULA breaks the continuity that had been maintained in the previous Hammer Dracula movies and begins in Dracula’s castle in Transylvania. In this opening scene we see the Count’s remains lying on a plinth in a castle chamber… and then a large (model) bat flies in and flaps over the plinth, regurgitating blood onto the Count’s remains! The remains, of course, start to react to the dripped blood and Dracula is once more reanimated!
This film, directed by Roy Ward Baker (who made one of my all-time favourite Hammer films, QUATERMASS AND THE PIT), is disliked by many, but I rather like some of the elements in this flawed, colourful Hammer romp.
The tone veers all over the place: one minute there’s a massacre of women and children by a flock of bats in the church, then there’s a Benny Hill-style moment with the naked Burgomaster’s daughter, then later we get Dracula torturing his servant with a red-hot sword.
One of the real positives with this movie is that Christopher Lee does get more to do in this entry: he stabs his vampire bride (Anouska Hempel) to death with a dagger because she slept with a visitor, he commands big bats, he climbs up a castle wall and, basically, he has more time on-screen, sometimes acting civil & courteous, whilst at other times acting savagely.
But there are quite a few silly moments… such as when Dracula’s eyes ‘glow’ through his eyelids to hypnotise the hero and the scenes with the model bats on fishing lines, which are unintentionally comical, flappy things. These bats were built by Roger (THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT) Dicken and are definitely not the best movie creatures he’s ever created.
Some of these shortcomings can definitely be blamed on the movie’s budgeting problems and a short schedule.
The story is rather repetitious, but Jenny Hanley looks gorgeous, there’s an attempt to add more gore (such as the attack by a bat on a priest), and Patrick Troughton, as Dracula’s servant Klove, plays an interesting role in that he disobeys his master occasionally to help the heroine.
So, my verdict is that this film is tonally uneven, full of incident and fun.
Here’s a Hammer studios promotional flyer, illustrated by Tom Chantrell, for SCARS OF DRACULA.
And here are some b/w studio photos of posed shots that were used by Chantrell for reference for the flyer…
Some posters…
Cover for a Derann Super 8 home movie…
Okay, here’s a pic of Michael Ripper…
And finally, here’s a publicity photo…
Based on the 1938 novella WHO GOES THERE? by John W Campbell, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD tells the story of a U.S Air Force crew, plus some scientists, who discover an alien being in the ice near a crashed flying saucer in the Artic. The block of ice that encases the extraterrestrial melts (after an electric blanket is thrown over it) and everyone is forced to defend themselves against the single-mindedly vicious killer alien.
This is an extremely good 50s sci-fi horror movie that will always remain one of my all-time favourite flicks.
I love this movie’s overlapping dialogue, the way characters don’t finish what they’re saying as someone else cuts in. The cast acts naturalistically, are likeable, and Kenneth Tobey, playing Captain Patrick Hendry, is such a cool bastard!
The Thing itself is a memorable creation: it is a hairless, sentient vegetable-being that can regrow its limbs, has thorn-like spikes on its hands and can reproduce asexually via seeds that germinate when fed on blood. This otherworldly killer (played by James Arness) regards humans (and Huskies) simply as food and has a raw intellect that is without passion or empathy.
One of the standout sequences involves the characters fighting off the Thing by hurling kerosene at the creature and setting it alight. It’s very thrilling stuff!
Our level-headed heroes finally defeat the Thing, but will more be coming?
“Keep watching the skies!”
In feudal Japan the capital is under threat from a mix of bandits and some demons/wizards, who are being led by Shuten-doji – so the warriors of the Genji clan are tasked with getting rid of the threat.
DEMON OF MOUNT OE is a Japanese period horror movie that was directed by Tokuzō (ZATOICHI’S VENGEANCE) Tanaka, produced by Daiei Film and based on a novel by Matsutarō Kawaguchi. It stars Kazuo Hasegawa, Raizô Ichikawa, Kôjirô Hongô and Shintarô Katsu.
Director Tanaka also made THE HAUNTED CASTLE (1969), KILLER WHALE (1962) and the witch film THE WOMAN OF THE SNOW (1968).
This colourful movie, inspired by Japanese folklore, features a sympathetic villain and some cool supernatural characters.
One demon woman loses her clawed hand and then comes back to reclaim it, another ‘wizard’ can turn into a kind of horned, pantomime demon bull and another transforms into a giant spider.
The spider-monster confrontation is my favourite scene: a bunch of samurai battling a fine-looking, full-scale puppet arachnid. Coooooooool!
DEMON OF MOUNT OE is a well-shot, pretty decent fantasy samurai flick, so track it down and give it a watch.
The film’s rather batty story includes murderous androids and a stolen piece of Stonehenge being used to create microchips for killer halloween masks! The villain’s plan involves synchronising a nation-wide sacrifice of little kids on Halloween night, via a television commercial, in order to help kickstart a new golden age of pagan celebration! When it was originally released, this sequel, directed by Tommy Lee Wallace, was not liked by many HALLOWEEN fans because it didn’t feature Michael Myers, but I think the movie is most definitely a fun watch (and Myers is actually featured, very briefly, in a few scenes from HALLOWEEN that are shown in a television commercial advertising the airing of the film).
There’s a lot to enjoy with HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH. I especially like the Silver Shamrock commercial jingle that counts down the days: it’s a real earworm! Tom Atkins is a likeable lead and Dan O’Herlihy is good as the quite charming villain Conal Cochran, who accepts his defeat at the end with good grace, applauding Atkins before he gets zapped. There are some gore moments too, including a woman getting blasted in the face by a faulty microchip, and a tramp being decapitated.
A memorable scene involves Cochran trying out the effectiveness of his masks on the Kupfer family in a test room at his novelties plant. As the Silver Shamrock commercial plays on a television, a flashing signal triggers the microchip in the mask that the Kupfer son is wearing, causing his mask to writhe & squirm as it absorbs the energy of Stonehenge, then a mass of insects and snakes crawl from the mask to kill the rest of the family!
The original script was written by Nigel (Quatermass) Kneale, but he asked to have his name removed from the credits after his screenplay was altered and extra gore was added.
Don Post designed the skull, witch, and jack-o’-lantern latex masks that are the focus of Cochran’s plan. The skull & witch masks were actually adaptations of existing Post Studios masks and the jack-o’-lantern was created specifically for the movie.
After the film’s disappointing reviews and lacklustre box office performance, Michael Myers was brought back in HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS in 1988, but I think this movie is a very entertaining standalone horror/science fiction flick… and I can still hear that Silver Shamrock jingle playing in my head!
The villainous high priest Maax (Rip Torn) attempts to thwart a prophecy by sending one of his witches to kidnap and murder the unborn son of King Zed. The witch uses magic to transfer the baby from the queen’s womb to the belly of a cow! Before the witch can kill the child, however, a villager intervenes, killing the hag-faced woman and raising the boy as his own son.
The boy, named Dar, is taught how to fight and it’s revealed that he has the ability to telepathically communicate with all kinds of animals (presumably because he was born from an animal).
Dar (Marc Singer), now a man, witnesses his village being wiped out by a horde of masked barbarians called Juns, who are allied with Maax. Dar, the only survivor of the massacre, sets out to avenge his people. Along the way Dar is joined by an eagle, a pair of ferrets he calls Kodo and Podo, and a great panther.
As the adventure continues Dar teams up with King Zed’s younger son Tal, bodyguard Seth (John Amos) and slave girl Kiri (Tanya Roberts), who turns out to actually be a warrior woman. After the death of King Zed, there’s a showdown with Maax atop a sacrificial pyramid, and then there’s a final battle with a mass of Jun warriors.
Can Dar and his allies survive all this? Yes they can… with a little help from some weird, winged devourer beings.
Director Don Coscarelli’s sword and sorcery movie is a fun romp, with Marc Singer proving to be a likeable hero and Tanya Roberts sticking in the memory as the attractive, feisty love interest Kiri. Then we have Rip Torn, who does a bit of scenery-chewing as the hawk-nosed bad guy Maax: he’s a high priest who is rather too fond of child sacrifice.
The screenplay, written by Paul Pepperman and Don Coscarelli, was based on a 1959 novel called THE BEAST MASTER, though the book is pretty different to the film: the novel’s hero is a Navajo warrior in a futuristic setting.
THE BEASTMASTER is a colourful adventure yarn that features a fine score by Lee Holdridge, witches with the bodies of young women and the faces of hags, spike-gloved berserker madmen, a ring with an eyeball that can spy on the heroes, and the aforementioned bird-humanoid creatures that wrap their victims in leathery wings to digest them alive!
The fiery, climactic battle with the Jun horde is a well-mounted, exciting finale, where Dar has a one-on-one fight with the Jun leader and, basically, this modestly budgeted fantasy flick is a very, very enjoyable watch.
I love this movie!
Here’s some movie concept art by Nikita Knatz…
And here are some posters…
Okay, a final look at those winged devourers…
And here’s a publicity shot of Singer and Roberts…
In the UK two boys make friends with a stranded alien that resembles a small, metal ball. They try to help the silvery being return home, but have to deal with a crook called George “Filthy” Potter. A mothership eventually arrives and it disgorges a whole swarm of alien metal balls to deal with Potter.
This low budget British kid’s flick, made for the Children’s Film Foundation, features an extraterrestrial that looks just like a metal ball bearing. This silvery alien is hunted by the military and likes to eat a lot! As so often happens in these CFF movies, the main villain is a small-time criminal (played here by Ron Pember), but there’s never any real threat: it’s all very child-friendly.
FX-wise, in many scenes the Glitterball is just a small, metal ball rolled along the floor, but for scenes where, for instance, it gobbles-up some food, stop-motion animation is used.
THE GLITTERBALL was directed by Harley Cokeliss, who’d made the non-science-fiction movie THE BATTLE OF BILLY’S POND the year previously, also for the Children’s Film Foundation. Harley went on to be second unit director on THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980), then directed flicks like DREAM DEMON (1988), BLACK MOON RISING (1986) and WARLORDS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (1982).
Brian Johnson did a lot of the special effects on THE GLITTERBALL, which was quite a coup for such a cheap production. Brian came on board after Harley, through a mutual friend, met up with Brian, who was supervising the model and effects work on Gerry Anderson’s SPACE: 1999 at the time. Brian was happy to help out, but needed Gerry’s okay to do so. Harley met with Gerry at his Bray Studio offices and Gerry generously gave his blessing to the project. Brian and his crew then created flying scenes of the mothership and made a working model of the Glitterball’s own min-spacecraft, complete with lights and an opening hatch.
Barry Leith, who’d worked on the British children’s TV series THE WOMBLES, did the stop-motion animation.
THE GLITTERBALL was recently released on DVD by the BFI as part of a triple bill of Children’s Film Foundation movies, which also includes SUPERSONIC SAUCER (1956).
Ambrose McKinley, a blind former soldier, moves with his seeing eye dog into a retirement community near a forest. He meets his neighbour Delores, but before they can get to know one another she is brutally assaulted that very same night, killed by something big and nasty. Ambrose is also attacked by the creature, his dog comes to his aid and the beast is eventually driven off, but Ambrose’s dog is fatally wounded. When the police find Ambrose the next day they assume it was an animal attack, but Ambrose knows it must be something else, something far more savage than a forest creature… and eventually he discovers that a werewolf stalks the area.
As the story progresses Ambrose tries to discover who the person is that transforms during nights of the full moon, and eventually he finds himself battling a whole group of newly-created werewolves at his home.
I really enjoyed this movie, which boasts a strong central performance from Nick Damici. Damici starred in and wrote the script for STAKE LAND (2010) and its sequel, and was the screenwriter for the effective, gritty crime flick COLD IN JULY (2014). In LATE PHASES he is brilliant as the stubborn, say it as it is, wilful Vietnam War vet. He really takes this role seriously and it shows on the screen.
The movie, directed by Adrian Garcia Bogliano, is well-plotted, with a story that kept me watching, wondering about the identity of the werewolf.
Now, about the werewolves…
Robert Kurtzman’s Creature Corps company designed the lycanthropes with quirky, large-eared, broad-mouthed faces. I think this isn’t a look that werewolf movie purists will necessarily like, with these creatures sporting apish bodies and almost impish, furry faces that lack the long snout of other werewolf designs. They almost resemble wolf-gremlins.
But I like the fact the movie uses practical effects to bring the beasts to life and sometimes it is good to see a different take on the look of iconic creatures like werewolves, though many will argue the big-eyed wolf-beasts here stray a little too far into goofy-looking territory. However, as I liked the movie a lot, I just accepted these weird werewolves as part of the package.
LATE PHASES ends with a full-on transformation and a pretty gory showdown. With its satisfying mix of horror, humour and drama I think it makes a fine companion piece to that other wonderful, quirky horror flick set in an old folks home: BUBBA HO-TEP (2002).
Some behind the scenes shots of the werewolves…
Monster Zone 