(1957)
Dir - Boris Petroff
Overall: MEH
The only horror work from low-budget director/producer Boris Petroff, The Unearthly is typical potboiler stuff, churned out with little enthusiasm to unceremoniously fill another double-bill slot for drive-ins. Shot in five days and with insufficient funds, this was the second to last feature that production designer Charles D. Hall was involved with, who had previously worked on various seminal genre films for Universal. His work here is as pedestrian as everyone else's involved though, through no fault of their own. Still, B-movie aficionados may be pleased to see John Carradine, Tor Johnson, and scream queen Allison Hayes all under the same roof. Carradine's mad scientist scheme is as asinine as any, (something about artificially creating a new gland to make people immortal), and Johnson gets to do his usual shtick of stumbling around as a hulking brute, but he actually gets one or two dim-witted lines of dialog this time for what it is worth. The melodrama is laid on thick and ridiculously, the special effects and make-up are crude, the plot is as predictable as they come, and Carradine gets to chew plenty of scenery at his leisure, so the whole thing is not without its goofy perks.
(1958)
Dir - Charles R. Rondeau
Overall: MEH
An early full-length from prolific television director Charles R. Rondeau, Devil's Partner is both poorly directed and staged, but it has some unsettling atmospherics that most D-rent production studios rarely delivered. Accounts vary as far as when it was officially released, (ranging from anywhere between 1958 and 1961), with Roger and Gene Corman's Filmgroup at one point putting it out on a double bill with the former's Creature from the Haunted Sea. In any event, it has some macabre moments which involve live animal sacrifices whose blood is decorated over a hexagon on the floor and though the camera turns away from overtly showing the ghastly details, they still provide a startling image for the era's drive-in crowds. As far as the story goes, it is a strange one which involves an old man and his alleged nephew conducting demonic rituals against various townsfolk for flimsy reasons, but the majority of the plot is full of generic actors giving stiff performances as uninteresting characters. Overly chatty and badly paced, both Rondeau and Edward Cronjager's shot construction is as bare-bones as it comes and the whole thing builds to a yawn-inducing conclusion.
(1959)
Dir - Irvin Berwick
Overall: WOOF
The directorial debut from uncredited dialog coach Irvin Berwick, The Monster of Piedras Blancas is easily on the shortlist of bottom-barrel Creature from the Black Lagoon knock-offs. In fact both Berwick and producer Jack Kevan had each done odds and ends at Universal and Columbia Pictures before forming their own small-scale production company Vanwick Productions, which only made this and one other feature seven years later. This is probably for the best since either a lack of talent or a lack of funds, (or both), play a detrimental role in the final product which is staggeringly boring from top-to-bottom. The costume for the monster of the title was allegedly pieced together from preexisting molds from The Mole People and This Island Earth, but the thing does not fully show up on screen until the last eight minutes. Before that, we only get a hilariously awkward instruction to the creature by only seeing his bottom half carrying a severed head, which by all accounts is more "gory" than many other films from the era were allowed to be. Said head shows up later with a live crab crawling over it, but these are the only two other moments besides the unceremonious finale that provide anything besides library-cued music playing arbitrarily through every scene and insultingly uninteresting characters just talking yawn-inducing nonsense with each other.
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