(1963)
Dir - Robert Gordon
Overall: GOOD
Michael Gough certainly had a knack for playing odious scumbags, and Black Zoo, (Horrors of the Black Zoo), features him in peak form as a deranged zookeeper/animal worshiping cult member who utilizes his bestial friends to get any undesirable humans out of the way. The script by producer Herman Cohen and Aben Kandel writes itself, leading to an inevitable conclusion that is less intense than it should be, plus it becomes unintentionally silly how short-sighted Gough's arrogant murder spree is, not to mention the fact that it takes those around him so long to figure out that he is the culprit. That said, it is interesting that Gough is presented in a partially sympathetic light, at least to a point since he genuinely cares for his animals without using any aggressive tactics to train them, at first only going after people who intend to exploit or abuse them. Not that these victims deserve to be brutally mauled by tigers and the like, and also not like Gough does not exhibit his own less than admirable personality traits elsewhere, creating more nuances than are usually found in B-movie screenplays. A few other recognizable thespians hold their own with Gough, (Jeanne Cooper, Marianna Hill, Elisha Cook Jr.), and if anything else, you get to see a chimpanzee smoke a cigarette, which can be filed under "they don't make movies like that anymore".
(1964)
Dir - Vic Savage
Overall: WOOF
The lone directorial effort from actor Vic Savage, (here going under the name A.J. Nelson), The Creeping Terror, (The Crawling Monster), makes the hilarious faux pas that no Z-grade monster movie should ever make. Well, it makes several such boo-boos, but the most obvious and egregious is shooting its shag rug/giraffe neck extraterrestrial menace almost exclusively in broad daylight and in long, up close takes so that we can fully bask in how pathetically awful it looks. The second most jarring aspect is the persistent narration in place of dialog, and the fact that what little dialog we do see omitting from the actor's mouths is exclusively ADRed. This was due to a problematic production where Savage failed to pay his special effects man, resulting in a slapdash effort to throw a creature together on the first day of its shooting. Facing fraud charges, Savage went into hiding before the film was released, necessitating the narration in place of conventional dialog, at which point one of the investors haphazardly ordering a new edit to be made. It is no wonder then that results are such an embarrassment of stupidity, but there are at least moments to laugh at if one can steer off the omnipresent boredom.
(1965)
Dir - Barry Mahon
Overall: WOOF
Dir - Barry Mahon
Overall: WOOF
A man in a, (very bad), monkey suit occasionally terrorizing a bunch of naked people is the gist of The Beast That Killed Women, a regional nudie by low-budget peddler Barry Mahon. Innocently idiotic, it barely constitutes as a movie. Most of the hour-long screen time is average looking Florida nudists walking around their naked camp and talking to each other here or there, sometimes about a monster that pops up and snatches one of them and sometimes just about wanting to get a full-body tan or enjoying the nice weather. Hardly any of the actors are professionals, their sparse dialog sounds like it was recorded with a toy microphone fifty yards away, there is zero sense of pacing, a plot that can generously be labeled "threadbare", and the cinematographer, (if one was ever hired), clearly quit and/or got inebriated with alcohol on the job. We even get a sequence where a man that the ape tossed around complains about having to eat jello in a hospital, eventually caving and eating the jello anyway. It is about as exciting as watching a professional baseball game, but there is no pretense here; it is just forgettable, antiquated, Z-grade garbage that lazily tries to differentiate itself from other nudist cheapies by throwing a gorilla into the mix.
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