Unknown World - 1951

 Also known as Night Without Stars.

Ok I just want to say if this had still had the name Night Without Stars, it would be a example of better name than movie. Unknown World fits it well because it's generic, bland, unnoticeable just like this movie. 

Most of this movie takes place in a grey room where "conflict" ensues, and if that sounds boring...well, it is! It's quite boring. 

Some stuffy scientist is out to prove some theory about hiding from radioactive age now that the atomic age is upon us, so he gets some guys and heads into the earth with 4 other bland people. 

There's the girl, the two guys who have conflict, scientist, and some other guy, and they have a few obstacles and explore the inner earth, and honestly that's about it. There's not much to this. 

It's a very middle of the road dramatic 50s movie with a slight sci fi edge to it, and that's about it. I don't mention these types of things unless they're really quite bad, but this is: the audio is so muffled that I missed a ton of what is said in this movie! It's remarkably bad. 

Overall, it's lifeless. 1.5 stars 

Ring of Terror - 1962

 I'm going through this new boxset right now, and it had a MST3K film in it, Ring of Terror.  Fuck it dude.  I'm a veteran of these boxsets and I voted that I could just rewatch the MST3K version. 

Ring of Terror is not one of my favorite MST3K films.  I cannot imagine this movie without the treatment these guys did on it, it's just a bad bad movie.  This was the episode that gave us the long-running "Puma!" callback they did for a while, that and the constant jokes about the age of the actors are the best jokes from this MST.

Ring of Terror aside from that is an insufferably long, slow movie about college medical students who are joining a frat and must pass their initiation tests.  There's a few of them thrust into this, and each one is tested to their own strengths and weaknesses pretty much, and that's basically all there is to it.  

The truth about the MST3K "old" jokes is very true.  According to what I can see here, some of the actors playing college students were in their 30s or even 40s.  That's problem number 1.  Problems 2, there is just not enough here to make this even marginally interesting, let alone scary.  This is like a supposed thriller drama with absolutely zero thrills and very sparse drama even.  

If I had watched the movie without MST aid it would for sure be a zero.  The MST version is barely a 2, its not my fave episode.  So, yeah, zero for this clunker.

They - 1974

 Also known as Invasion from Inner Earth and Hell Fire.

Bill Rebans makes another appearance on this set after The Alpha Incident.  Now, in that review, I talked about how surprised I was that I was liking a Bill Rebane film after my previous knowledge of him from Monster A Go Go, and hey maybe thats just his worse film and its all up from there?  Cause a few minutes of research reveals I also kinda liked his movie Rana early on in the blog.

They is similar in feel to The Alpha Incident in minimalism.  Alpha was all basically in one room with minimal amount of actors and happenings, and this movie is as well a lot in one room, or shot outside, with a minimal amount of actors and happenings.  They both suffer from essentially similar problems as well, in that to keep minimalism going you need a good script, and both don't quite have an adept enough hand, but also have plenty of entertainment value nonetheless.

Early on in They, a couple of isolated people way out in the middle of nowhere are only tenuously connected to the rest of the Earth by a radio, a radio which they begin to hear strange reports on.  It seems the world is descending into chaos, and all sorts of crazy happenings are going on.  When they fly to a nearby town, they're told not to land, and the air traffic guy literally throws himself onto the tarmac to stop them from doing so.  Seems there is a crazy new disease spreading, and it's basically total chaos.

This movie had some interesting factors rewatching in 2023.  The elephant in the room here is that it felt reminiscent of Covid, especially my experience, where I lived in the backwoods of Idaho and mostly heard about things going on in cities and around the world, where my own experience was seeing nothing and having my daily life change very little.

It felt more like they had something to do with the characters in this over Alpha Incident, but this movie still had some lags, and I think it also had a few plot holes.  There's a recurring bit where the people in the house gets calls from a weird alien voice over the radio, and I guess it's not a spoiler to tell you, we never figure out what that was all about.  Its hinted at for sure, but then again there is never a clear resolution to what happens in the movie at all, and the ending is a great wtf moment for sure.

I liked this and I thought the music especially was awesome.  I'll give it 4 stars.

The Horrible House on the Hill - 1974

 Also known as People Toys, The Devil Times Five, and Tantrums. 

Put on this multi-named horror while I was working and you know what? Actually didn't want to multi task or distract myself away from it! A good movie!

This is why people do this. I mean the whole Grindhouse cult thing, why people keep watching them, is to find hidden gems like this that are not obvious. We dig and dig, watch and watch, and eventually, statistically speaking, you will find one. 

People Toys is low budget and flawed, sure, but it's always about what is done right. The movie has good actors, style, some deaths, nudity, and it's cozy as heck, filmed in the snow swept countryside somewhere. 

A bunch of kids and a nun escape a bus crash early on, from there they roam around until they find a chalet where some people are staying. The kids are all a bit weird acting, but so are the people at the chalet, so we dismiss it, that is until we see the kids kill someone.

Numerous times, this movie uses a weird slow motion with bizarre sounds and effects, and in this case it adds to the strange feeling of this extremely odd movie.  The tone is offbeat but not bad, and the plot moves quickly with a lot of characters and deaths to keep you going. Its got the feeling of a true sickness to it that I appreciated. 

I was surprised! I'll give it 4 stars. 

Alien Zone - 1978

 Also known as The House of the Dead

Continuing the boxset, I was thrilled when the plot of this movie sounded like an anthology.  A wandering businessman meets a crypt-keeper, who summons him in, and tells him stories about the bodies stored there?  How did these macabre deaths happen?  Stories told are:

1. a dead schoolteacher whose dislike for children amounts to them getting revenge.

2. a photographer and serial killer who likes to film his murders.

3. an American crime detective ala Sherlock Holmes who meets his British counterpart.

4. a busines man who dislikes a homeless person, and then through a series of completely insane torturous circumstances, becomes one himself.

These range from pretty straight forward (the first two) to incredibly weird (the last one).  The longest is the Sherlock Holmes inspired one, and that one is pretty tame all the way around.  The best is by far the last one, where they just go for it in the crazy shenanigans that happen to this businessman, and everyone's favorite torture device a spike wall in it!!

The audio and video quality on this movie is aggressively bad.  I'll say that straightup.  I thought of it as I watched it as it was in the language of Muffle and should have had English subtitles.  Similarly, the shots are awful, and there's some awfully lit shots and shots where you completely cannot tell what's happening because of the cameras being misused by inadequate idiots.

Overall an anthology makes for easy viewing, especially when there's essentially 5 stories it tells and the entire movie is only 75 minutes long.  This one was a breeze.  3.5 stars.

The Lost City - 1935

 I wasn't sure if I should do this as one entry or two.  The DVD set has it as two films, part 1 and part 2.  I am not sure if that means this is technically a 49 movie boxset, or if it is indeed 50?  Whatever dude.

The Lost City was a serial, with 12 original installments and presumably with little cliffhangers at the end of each one which then they would come back to the next week and solve.  The plot is a sort of plucking the best (opinion, naturally) parts of a few classic plotlines:  the lost civilization thing, mad scientist thing, hollow Earth thing, and then the African tribe / blatant 30s racism thing.

The bare bones in this 3 hour 15 minute thing is that there's a scientist who is in Africa which our hunky heroes need to confront because the scientist is casuing earthquakes.  The scientist is trying to get into the Earth or is trying to find a lost civilization or both, and they need to go stop that shit.

Once they get there, they have to deal with this primitive African tribe the scientist has enslaved, and that includes their giant Boyo.  There's romance, there's action, there's intrigue...meh, that's the sales pitch anyhow.

It's super long.  It's really, really long.  90 minutes in the first movie, 105 minutes on the next.  It's 3 hours 15 minutes as said before.  In order to not have the repetition caused by the cliffhangers, they edited all those out, which makes the plot not have the dramatic effect either, which makes it incredibly slow and boring.

Maybe there was once interest in this from someone somewhere.  Maybe someone out there now would still enjoy it.  I won't slam that as a prospect.  But it's not for me.  I'll give it .5 stars.

Star Odyssey - 1979

 It's been a little while since I saw any of these weird Italian Star Wards rip offs, and one of them was on the boxset....so....yep here we go.

War of the Robots Battle Beyond the Stars War of the Planets and now this, I've watched all 4 of Alfonso Brecia's Star Wars rip offs. 

Thee movies trademark is their near incomprehensibility.  I was thinking when I was watching it of a great "pitch" or summation of the things with these movies:  This series of Star Wars rip offs might take the prize of "Films of which it matters the least if you know what is going on or not".  These flicks DO NOT matter if you're paying attention, if you know who character A B or C are, if you know who's fighting and why.  They just sort of exist, in a bizarre mishmash of color and sound.

I reread the Wikipedia article on the film just now, which goes through the plot.  Apparently, Earth is auctioned off to an evil space guy, who kidnaps earthlings as slaves.  The good guys get involved and they fight the space guy, and of course, they have force powers and glowing swords because remember after all we are ripping off Star Wars.

The 4 of these movies all have some things in common.  They all feature blond men who play robots running around willy nilly, the supposed Stormtroopers.  They all feature the Star Wars force power, which is usually unexplained.  They all feature robots, which are usually played for comedic effect just like in the regular Star Wars. 

The fun thing about these is usually what DOES work in this hodgepodge, and there's things here.  The effects are noticeably cheap, but some of them like the robot men and stuff look really cool.  The makeup and the look of everything is surprisingly entertaining as well.  

I saw a great summation on Wikipedia, which I'll second, which says it depends on your mood.  If you want to see what gets lost in translation and "what could have been" these are really interesting documents.  It also made me for one recognize just how much of a lightning in a bottle stroke of luck and genius Star Wars really was, because it contains a TON of stuff that doesn't make sense and isn't explained.

I give these generally like 2.5 stars.

Frozen Alive - 1964

 I'm chompin away at this boxset slowly but surely.  When I looked through the remaining movies, I had a crisis of faith because there are a lot of really old black and white serial looking things left, and that does not excite me.

I chose Frozen Alive because it sounded intriguing.  It claimed it was about a scientist who freezes himself when he is pinned for a murder he did not commit, and the concept of "will the future hold a man responsible for a crime if he wakes up way after it has been committed"?  Or something like that anyway.

Frozen Alive, lemme tell ya, mismarkets itself a bit here.  The things in the synopsis do happen, but I knew I was in for a long movie when nearly an hour in, no one had died, no one had been frozen, and indeed nothing had happened.  What had the movie been about so far you ask?  Nothing, in short.  An alcoholic woman plays the fool, a scientist tolerates her, and we watch this happen in real time with no interest.

Then, in a seeming rush to have a plot, the alcoholic woman shoots herself on accident, the scientist quickly freezes himself, and we careen carelessly into the crux of the story; is he still responsible.  But I thought, I guess wrongfully so, that some amount of time would pass between freezing and being investigated.  I was wrong.  It's like days later, and so the whole idea "will he be prosecutable in the future" is not valid...?

If it's sounding like there was no reason for this movie to be made, well guess what you're spot on.  Perhaps the DVD plot breakdown gave me a false hope but if this wasn't about a frozen man put on trial what was it about?!  That is the plot, but its extremely minimal, with basically nothing given emphasis for the entire hour 20.  Which basically means it sucks and is pointless.  Half a star.

House of the Living Dead - 1974

 Also known as Doctor Maniac, Shadows Over Bridge Farm, Curse of the Dead, and Kill Baby Kill.

A slew of alternate titles is a common occurrence in these grindhouse style movies I watch, and this has five titles so it must be good right?  No, not really.  I have tried to find a correlation between the amount of alternate titles and the quality of the films, but so far nothing doing.

House of the Living Dead was filmed under the title of Shadows Over Bridge Farm, and the clear distinction between that title and House of the Living Dead was the inclusion of something alluding to "Living Dead" ie zombies.  Yeah, they changed the name to try to cash in on the craze for undead at the time, and you know what, no shade on that...  BUT!  But, the movie has no undead, no zombies, nothing even close, so shame on them.

The plot is that in South Africa these rich white guys live a life of luxury, and local Africans don't like them so they're regularly practicing voodoo of some sort to unknown nefarious intent.  The white family is made up of brothers Michael and Breckinridge, and Michael gets a new wife Maryanne who comes to live with them.  She discovers Breckinridge creeping around and spying on her and supposedly never leaving his top floor room, and in the meanwhile scares start to happen.

Meh.  It was slow.  Really, really slow.  I mean, I don't mind slow but this movie crawled.  It inched.

The movie, I dunno.  It was extremely average in almost all ways except for how slow it was.  Also, when your main characters are stiff British blokes in high necked shirts, it's like do you want us to hate these people we're watching or not?  I never know the intention.  I'll give it a two.

Piranha, Piranha - 1973

 Also known as just Piranha and Caribe.

Years later, a little dude with the name of Joe Dante would direct another movie called Piranha in the 80s, and it would go on to become a cult fave, so how does this one work?  This Venezualan, insect-ridden film is quite different from Dante's horror-comedy aesthetic.

I would have to think that this may rank highly in the list of the most erroneously named films, if that list exists, then may I suggest we put this in the top ten.  Piranha Piranha?  Okay, we do have one Piranha related death, and they are a thing to worry about, but piranha barely plays any part of this largely human-based threat movie.

Some guys are in the wildlife taking pictures and they run into fellow white person Caribe, who seems nice enough and offers to show them around.  He speaks the local language, they don't, and they all bond over drinking at a local bar one night.  The photographers are two men and a woman, and soon enough our plucky little Caribe is hitting on her and letting her know he's interested.  She isn't, and some tensions rise.  But what's coming, what they'll find out, is this Caribe fellow is actually more dangerous than the piranha could ever be....

This movie pulls you into the muck and pretty much keeps you there.  There are not many likeable characters in the movie, and the gritty-ness of the film and the darkness of it's content is really quite palpable.  This movie feels a bit like chewing on sandy rocks.

The tension is good and the characters are interesting enough, though not developed at all.  It's exploitation feeling while still being remarkably tame, besides the slimier parts of the plot the rest of the movie could practically be rated PG.  So all in all it's quite well balanced, and shit, I liked it!  I'll give it like 3 stars.

Panic - 1982

 Also known as Zombie 4 and Monster of Blood.

Panic, I guessed the 70s earlier in writing the review, and that's cuz this movie looks like a lil old lady.  It doesn't run like one, but does it look blurry and fuzzy, man.

Panic caught my attention early on because I was half paying attention and the music was awesome, thus prompting me to fucking pay attention cause this movie might actually be worth watching.  I did pay attention to the rest of it, cause I have a job to do, the job is watching movies.

Panic is clearly a low budget sleezy gunk-ridden film, one where in the first 5 minutes, a guy turns into a monster and kills someone, and a woman is shown topless fucking a guy in a car.  I mean, I'm just saying, you know you're in for a treat early on.  

The movie cannot maintain that breakneck pace of course, but when this one slows down, it still remains relatively wackadoo.  Is that word trending?  I feel like I've been hearing it a lot lately. The monster in the film is seen a lot, and there's a weird off kilter feeling to the characters and many of the interactions that keeps this one from being a total gutter flick.

The town quarantines and calls in the big guns, so a lot of this movie is microscopic in scope, which really helps, and keeps the character count minimal while keeping the tension high.  There's a ton of weird shit in this movie, and it moves along extremely fast, and I did like it a lot.  I'll give it a four.