(1960)
Dir - George Pal
Overall: GOOD
Overall: GOOD
MGM's big budget adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine boasts an impressive and memorable production design that forgives some of its plot inconsistencies and a dopey romance that seems shoehorned in for mere commercial pandering. Stop-motion animator George Pal was an ideal choice to bring the source material to life, staging some wonderful sequences where the decades fly by as Rod Taylor sits in the title contraption's seat and watches the world morph beyond recognizability. These moments, grandiose matte paintings, a lavish set design, an oatmeal lava destruction scene, and the freakish look of the mutated Morlocks make up a plethora of eye candy that are as iconic as any from the best of the era's science fiction movies. Taylor, (in his first top-billed role), makes for a dashing, Hollywood-tailored inventor who becomes hellbent on teaching mankind's distant descendants from tens of thousands of centuries in the future how to regain their humanity, but there is not much for the rest of the cast to do besides looking bewildered in front of him. Overlong in some places and hardly scientifically accurate for a 19th century man to be able to breathe, eat, and communicate in English with people so ridiculously far ahead in the future, it keeps up a solid pace and manages to convey the class system themes of Wells' initial novel along with all of the visual pizazz.
(1961)
Dir - William J. Hole Jr.
Overall: MEH
Batman fans may get a kick out of watching Commissioner Gordon Neil Hamilton run an evil devil god cult in The Devil's Hand, (Witchcraft, The Naked Goddess, Devil's Doll, Live to Love), but this dud is otherwise instantly forgettable. Shot in both Los Angeles and Mexico with an international cast, it concerns an underwritten Robert Alda who becomes spellbound by the glamorous Linda Christian and her wicked cohorts who put on robes, utilize voodoo dolls, make grandiose speeches about rejecting goodness, and sacrifice their members with a bunch of knives hung from a wheel. The story becomes increasingly lazy as it goes on, with Alda bouncing between being hopelessly sucked into his new Satanic friends and playing a long-winded con on them at the same time, giving the plot an aura of convenience over logic. Director William J. Hole Jr. never comes up with anything clever to do with Joyce Heims' lackluster screenplay, allowing the pacing to regularly stall and for everyone to play things too serious to invite any much-needed camp appeal into the proceedings. Monotonously structured and asleep at the wheel, it misses whatever diabolical goal it was aiming for.
(1968)
Dir - Andy Milligan
Overall: WOOF
The first color movie The Ghastly Ones, (Blood Rites), from Andy Milligan is typical of the director's uniformly terrible work. Shot on faulty 16 mm film, featuring piss-pour actors with zero charisma, laughably crude gore effects with animal entrails, a nonsensical story, abysmal cinematography, non-stop stock music playing in every scene, and poorly recorded dialog that is embarrassing to begin with, it is all here to bore the living shit out of trash movie buffs. Milligan deservedly belongs in the conversation of the worst filmmakers who ever lived, having churned out a couple dozen Z-rent regional exploitation movies until his untimely death in 1991, but only the most forgiving of viewers can tolerate the wretched results of even his "best" movies. This one was remade by Milligan himself in 1978 as Legacy of Blood, pointlessly so as it was just as unwatchable and suffered identical setbacks. On the one hand, you can feel sorry for a guy like Milligan in that he was never granted anything close to a reasonable budget to work with, yet judging by the results of what he was able to pull-off within perpetually limited means, why would anyone take a chance on giving this guy any more dimes to see if he could do any better?
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