(1953)
Dir - George Marshall
Overall: MEH
Right smack in the middle of their sixteen film starring run of films together, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis took on the remake of 1940's The Ghost Breakers, itself the third cinematic adaptation of the play by Paul Dickey and Charles W. Goddard. Here titled Scared Stiff and once again featuring George Marshall behind the lens, (who likewise helmed the Bob Hope stared movie from thirteen years prior), it is unfortunately a bloated watch with several musical numbers and monotonous gags stretching things out to a less than agreeable hour and forty-seven minutes. As usual, Lewis' "Mah-hoyvan!" shtick is an acquired taste and only works due to how purposely obnoxious it is. Martin is likewise in usual be it more agreeable form, tight with his zinger charm and crooner cool with most of the other players merely serving as straight men and women. Only the last twenty minutes in this version feature any Scooby-Doo worthy spook gags, but for those who agree with the French that Lewis was the bees knees of falling down and making goofy faces, this should suffice just fine.
(1955)
Dir - Robert Gordon
Overall: WOOF
Despite a heftier budget than other Z-grade copy cats plus the renowned Ray Harryhausen on board to work his stop-motion magic, Columbia Pictures' It Came from Beneath the Sea still ends up as one of the most insultingly boring giant monster movies ever made. The colossal sea creature is mildly teased once or twice for the first hour and when it finally emerges from the ocean to take down San Fransisco landmarks, it goes off screen just as quickly as it arrives to make way for more boring white actors to continue delivering dialog that does not matter. Directly inspired by 1953's It Came from Outer Space and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, (the latter of which also featured Harryhausen's contributions), the script by Hal Smith and George Worthington Yates offers up absolutely no distinguishing characteristics. It is the same ole "mutated animal that has grown to overwhelming size due to hydrogen bombing" premise, but the length at which the entire production goes in keeping said mutated animal off screen is unforgivable. Harryhausen was of course underfunded, which resulted in him only having time to animated six out of the usual eight octopuses arms, thus jokingly referring to the creature as the "sixtopus". It looks fine for the brief moments that the camera is allowed to linger on it, at least when it is above ground terrorizing the Golden Gate Bridge and not so much during the underwater finale when it grasps onto a toy submarine.
(1957)
Dir - Kurt Neumann
Overall: MEHDeservedly buried amongst the herd of message-heavy, alien threat science fiction films from the 1950s, Kronos, (Kronos, Destroyer of the Universe, Kronos, Ravager of Planets), by 20th Century-Fox subsidiary Regal Films is a typical lab coat drama with a comparatively nil amount of action compared to wooden, generic actors delivering dialog in military offices and scientific establishments. The title creature/spaceship/alien contraption is a gigantic series of black blocks and pipes that turns into an adorable, laughably unconvincing cartoon when it decides to stomp around the US landscape to smash everything in its wake. Naturally, all of the human personnel take such a threat deadly serious to the point where there is barely any humor or even light banter between anyone besides a single scene of the two most attractive players gallivanting around on a beach before things get real. Director Kurt Neumann had a prolific handful of decades before the latter part of his career found him delivering more and more campy drive-in fare such as this, but he is limited by both the budget and cinematic confines of the era which do not hold up with such a derivative story and inadequate special effects to boot. Forgettable, yet harmlessly so at least.
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