(1965)
Overall: MEH
The same year that he made the doofy comedy horror short Monster Crash the Pajama Party, director David L. Hewitt also delivered his full-length debut The Wizard of Mars, (Horror of the Red Planet, Alien Massacre). Ed Wood Jr.-worthy production values are front in center, which provide some unintended hysterics when the plot is not hopelessly stuck in the muck. The small handful of non-charasmatic characters spend untold minutes of screen time walking around the barren planet of the title, (actually the Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park, Nevada and the surrounding desert), staring at embarrassing special effects with no face shields on their helmets because those things cost money. As the title would suggest, it is supposed to be narratively stylized after The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but besides a half-second mention of a golden path and the lone female character being named Dorothy and having three astronaut companions with her, any similarities between this and L. Frank Baum's famed source novel are non-existent. There are occasional shots where Hewitt manages to make the setting look otherworldly and the last twenty-odd minutes features a model sand castle, a weird whispering alien thing, and John Carradine delivering expository dialog as a disembodied head.
(1967)
Overall: WOOF
A D-rent anthology offering from hack director David L. Hewitt, Dr. Terror's Gallery of Horrors, (Return from the Past, The Blood Suckers, Alien Massacre, Gallery of Horror, Gallery of Horrors, The Witch's Clock), is mostly famous for Amicus Productions going after it to change its title, the participation of both John Carradine and Lon Chaney Jr., and for recycling footage from Roger Corman's seminal Edgar Allan Poe films. Though it has the same structure as other omnibus cinematic collections, (Carradine is the Crypt Keeper host, introducing several segments that all share macabre themes), it has the wretched distinction of looking as if it was made for pocket change. Every vignette takes place almost entirely on a single sound stage with different decor, giving it a high school play vibe except with worse screenwriting. Allegedly based off of Creepy stories from Russ Jones, only the most lazy and cliched of ingredients come through with a tale about a condemned witch, a vampire, a dead guy back for revenge, a modern day Frankenstein, and then another vampire with the most brisk and pathetic Dracula reworking ever filmed, (saying something). The conclusion of each entry is more embarrassing than the last and Carradine's long-winded introductions only make one feel bad for the fact that he needed the money this badly.
(1967)
Overall: MEH
A redundant remake to the 1964 film The Time Travelers that also inspired the 1966 television series The Time Tunnel, Journey to the Center of Time, (Time Warp), finds writer/director/producer David L. Hewitt calling all of the shots, having previously only been credited with the story concept along with Ib Melchior on The Time Travelers film. Why anyone thought that it was necessary to green-lit a forgettable B-movie redo a mere three years after the fact, (and one year after the TV show version), is a question best left unanswered, but why they also did so in an even more cheap and lame manner is that much more confusing. Granted, Hewitt changes some of the specifics to the plot of three male scientists and a female one getting stranded in the future due to their well-intended space-time continuum experiments, sending them into the past as well so that they can encounter volcanic stock footage and stop-motion dinosaur animation from One Million B.C.. Some of the sets are fun in their tackiness, (that is when they do not rely on mere black backgrounds to save money), plus the future human encounter has all of the actors in ridiculous costumes while bathed in blue light.
(1969)
Overall: WOOF
Seven years before Dino De Laurentiis produced a King Kong remake that nobody liked, D-rent genre director David L. Hewitt took an unofficial crack at it with The Mighty Gorga; an enormously bigger embarrassment that has gone down in the annals of horrendous, no budget hack-jobs. The plot line devised by and unfortunately credited to Hewitt, Jean Hewitt, and producer Robert Vincent O'Neill follows the RKO classic close enough to be an Italian mockbuster, with boring white people venturing into the jungle in order to capture the giant and elusive ape that is worshiped by the locals, (who are just other white people in brown face). This is all because a circus is close to going out of business, so the Mighty Kong Gorga would be an ideal attraction if only the production had the means to get it back to the main land. Instead, we spend almost the entire movie in its African landscape, (which was probably just somebody's backyard in California), and boy is this a poster boy for the worst "special effects" in cinema history. The title primate was allegedly played by Hewitt himself in a cheap monkey costume and in one hilariously Z-grade scene, he battles a rubber dinosaur hand puppet to the death. Besides a couple of moments of such abysmally-realized mayhem, the film is predominantly just made up of our personality-vacant characters running around and talking to each other.
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