(1960)
Dir - Edgar G. Ulmer
Overall: MEH
Shot back-to-back with Beyond the Time Barrier in less than two weeks, (allegedly), The Amazing Transparent Man is a dopey knock-off of Universal's The Invisible Man's Revenge. Director Edgar G. Ulmer was well-versed in such quickly and cheaply made B-movies, this being one of his last theatrically-released films; a film that clocks in at under an hour, has mediocre-at-best special effects, a laughably stupid script, and wears its twenty dollar budget on its sleeve. Most of the plot unfolds in a single household where a dopey and miscast James Griffith has three unwilling participants at his beck and call by the flimsiest means possible, pointing a gun at them, locking one of their daughters in an easily escapable room, and just lying to a guy about his son still being alive. Griffith's plan is to develop an army of invisible soldiers for no reason that any viewer will either care about or buy into and for the most part, things unfold with people being hit on the head, locked up, and easily believing anything that anyone says. It is more dull than unintentionally hilarious, with a cast and crew merely going through the motions to collect what must have been just a meager paycheck.
(1966)
Dir - Francis D. Lyon
Overall: MEH
Though it cannot escape the low-budget B-level tyranny of interchangeable white people standing in rooms while talking, Destination Inner Space gives its silly, amphibious extraterrestrial plenty of screen time and manages to build some character moments along the way. Shot back-to-back with Castle of Evil over the course of two weeks, it comes off as the rushed production job that it is. Besides some underwater shots, it takes place entirely within a small handful of sparsely decorated sets and the miniature work is some of the least convincing that you can find, basically coming off as toy submarines and flying saucers skimming the floor of a shallow beach. The rubber suit monster looks ridiculous and there is zero attempt made to shoot it in anything remotely atmospheric, but this gives it a laughable charm since said creature is viscous enough to continuously attack our crop of forgettable character actors, some of whom fall in love and some of whom have a previous beef with each other that must get sorted out before they can all get on the same page against their predicament. Paul Dunlap's music is typically bombastic and some idiot forgot to shut it off during the more intimate dramatic bits as it distractingly plays over even inconsequential transition scenes still at full-tilt.
(1968)
Dir - John Maddox
Overall: WOOF
A Z-rent grindhouse exploitation "roughie" from one-time director John Maddox, (unless this was an alias used for someone who made several of these non-movies and did not want to be associated with more than one of them), Scare Their Pants Off! has a brainless premise of two guys kidnapping women and engaging in convoluted bad acting in front of them. The first vignette has a guy in a medieval mask and a black cloak talking in a strained voice as he convinces a woman to have sex with him before he kills himself, the next has a guy in brown face conducting a sacrificial ritual involving wide-eyed mugging and zoom-ins on a demon statue, and the third is a Nazi-styled interrogation played for "laughs". A failure on every front, it has a minimal amount of nudity and cuts away from any graphic sex or violence, leaving nothing but a pair of assholes awkwardly performing experimental stage plays in front of poor women who have the thespian chops of a wooden plank. It is too pathetic and clumsy to land its intended Manhattan seediness and instead seems like something that should have been lost decades ago, but on the plus side, it is only an hour long so at least the suffering is over with quickly.
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