(1960)
Dir - Phil Tucker
Overall: WOOF
The last directorial effort from no-budget filmmaker Phil Tucker, The Cape Canaveral Monsters is inescapably hindered by its non-existent production values, but it is a curiosity amongst alien takeover/Cold War conspiracy science fiction from the era. Shot at the same Griffith Park where Tucker made his also infamous Robot Monster seven years earlier, the story is Ed Wood worthy stupid, with a pair of aliens in human disguise who are conducting invasion surveys for their home planet inside of a spaceship that looks like a broom closet. Everything about Tucker's direction is wretched since he has no sense of pacing, where to put the camera, or how to stage even a single exciting moment. That said, the actors are not as embarrassing as one would assume and their dialog is rendered more boring than ridiculous on account of the sterile staging of every last scene. Jason Johnson and Katherine Victor's possessed extraterrestrial couple hardly come off as if they are from another world as they engage in mild bickering with each other like a married couple stereotype. Ultimately, this commits the worst bad movie crime in that it is terrible without being unintentionally funny or insulting, instead just coming off as a bland-flavored waste of sixty-nine minutes.
(1962)
Dir - Ray Milland
Overall: GOOD
One of only a handful of films to be directed by Ray Milland, (all of which featured him in the lead as well), Panic in Year Zero! is a relentlessly cynical bit of Cold War paranoia and all the more effective because of it. The script by Jay Sims and John Morton paints a bleak picture where civilization immediately begins to deteriorate as soon as evidence of a nuclear fall-out is witnessed by country-dwelling civilians. Milland and family, (which also includes Frankie Avalon), make impossibly cutthroat decisions while trying to maintain their humanity, slowly succumbing to the more aggressive acts of desperation that they are justifying defending themselves from. It is a simple exploration of mankind's innate struggle with survival when the fabric of normalized behavior goes out the window, but Milland handles the purposely claustrophobic material with a solid sense of momentum. The only drawback is the atrociously inappropriate musical score from Les Baxter which almost exclusively uses uptempo, borderline comical jazz music to propel even the most downtrodden scenes.
(1969)
Dir - Joseph Adler
Overall: WOOF
Larry Cohen already had a hefty amount of television credits and a handful of film scripts under his belt when he penned Scream, Baby, Scream, (Nightmare House), for low-budget director Joseph Adler. Sadly, the lousy screenplay could have been authored by anybody as one would have to stretch to link it in with Cohen's latter efforts as a filmmaker himself. Focusing on art college students that are either unlikable, annoying, or dull if not all three at once, endless amounts of screen time are dedicated to their petty, uninteresting squabbles which are only interjected by a few seconds at a time with a Cesar the somnambulist-looking murderer in garish makeup. Eventually, everybody trips on acid which is far, far less compelling of a watch that one would hope for and then the final act kicks off with a lengthy flashback that slows things down even more. The characters remain detrimentally obnoxious throughout the entire movie so that when a sinister element is finally established concerning Larry Swamson's smirking art teacher who engages in disturbing face-ruining experiments, no one watching is likely to even care.
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