50's American Horror Part Twenty-Two

THE UNKNOWN TERROR

(1957)

Dir - Charles Marquis Warren

Overall: WOOF

 

Primitive natives and uncharasmatic white people join forces again in The Unknown Terror; a B-level crud rock with only a couple of minutes in the last set piece to provide some unintentional chuckles for any audience member that is still awake while watching.  The first of eight quickly made cheapies by 20th Century Fox and director Charles Marquis Warren's Emirau Productions, it brings back calypso singer Sir Lancelot after nearly a decade-long break from feature film appearances.  Lancelot does his I Walked with a Zombie shtick of singing a ukulele ditty, (with lyrics that tie-in to the story), to whoever recently arrives on foreign soil, in this case being a couple of people looking for a relative that went missing during an exploration of the dreaded "Cave of the Dead".  Said cave ends up being nothing more than dingy-lit set that the special effects team pours detergent bubbles over, which because movies are silly, creates human fungi monsters with bulbous cotton balls glued to their faces.  Not that we get any clear shots of them, (wisely so), or much screen time of such a threat, as almost the entire thing is just another excuse to have boring characters exchange boring dialog while the boring, library-cued music never shuts the hell up.

 

TEENAGE MONSTER 

(1958)
Dir - Jacques R. Marquette
Overall: WOOF

With a title like Teenage Monster, (Meteor Monster), and having been released in 1958, one would assume that this belongs in with the slew of drive-in genre films from the era that featured and were catered to contemporary teenager antics like school, convertibles, chicks, and rock music.  Such is not the case though since this is oddly a western/horror hybrid centered around a blackmailing companion and a "teenage" simpleton who is portrayed by a fifty-year old Gilbert Perkins, looking every bit of his age even under Jack Pierce's hairy caveman makeup.  Perkins spends the entirely of the film pathetically moaning his unintelligible dialog while his mother, (Anne Gwynne), scolds him for killing people, makes him promise to stop killing people, and then leaves him alone so that he can nonchalantly go kill people again.  The only directorial effort from cinematographer/producer Jacques R. Marquette, the movie was whipped together quickly and for as little money as possible to fulfill a double bill with The Brain from Planet Arous and the production easily reeks of such uninspired dinginess.

THE MANSTER

(1959)

Dir - George P. Breakston/Kenneth G. Crane

Overall: MEH

 

An anomaly of sorts since it was an American production that was made in Japan and with various local actors speaking English, (some barely if at all with an accent even), The Manster, (Sōtō no Satsujinki, The Split), is otherwise unintentionally funny, potboiler tripe.  The typical mad scientist angle is taken where someone is working on a serum or a whatever because also whatever, only for it to of course go horrendously awry even after every previous attempt has also gone awry, which one would think would not be the least bit surprising for said mad scientist, (here played with zero enthusiasm by Tetsu Nakamura).  As the doomed victim/eventual manster of the title, Peter Dyneley first starts acting like an asshole before literally a new creature grows out of him in the form of a hilarious puppet head attached to his shoulder.  The makeup and visual effects are primitive at best, but they also have a horrifically gaudy charm to them that serves its alarming purpose just fine for such a low-rent production.  It lumbers along plot wise, taking forever for Dynelely to start transforming and going on murderous rampages, so we instead get to witness him gallivanting around Tokyo as a womanizing scumbag for the first two acts.  There are a couple of jarring moments to point and laugh at, but otherwise this is an international co-production creature feature that is best left forgotten.