Classic schlock: ‘Attack of the Giant Leeches’

“Attack of the Giant Leeches” sounds like the quintessential low-budget drive-in horror movie, and with good reason:

It’s a Roger Corman production at American International Pictures.

It’s set in Florida but there’s a southern “swamp trash” – to use a phrase uttered in the movie – feel to the movie, right down to the corn pone accents and moonshine-swilling hillbillies.

It’s a Roger Corman production (did I mention that already?).

Its title alone sounds like every bad imaginary movie that ever played out on a drive-in movie screen in some other movie or TV show.

“Attack of the Giant Leeches,” all 62 minutes of it, is great fun, a mix of southern fried domestic drama right out of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and low-rent monster movie.

Legendarily made in eight days, “Attack” has a low-rent feel but doesn’t stint on action. Except for a couple of scenes that feel like people are standing around talking for the sake of filling up a few minutes of screen time, “Attack” brings the drive-in thrills early. One of the titular characters shows up even before the credits, and there’s two or three attacks in the first 20 minutes of the movie.

A small Florida town is beset by attacks by man-sized leech creatures. As people turn up sucked to death or missing, game warden Steve swings into action. Well, sort of. First of all, he needs to make sure nobody’s going to do anything to hurt indigenous wildlife.

The creatures are low rent – somebody sewed plastic octopus suckers on the forerunner of the Snuggie – but probably more effective because they are little seen.

There’s one genuinely creepy moment in the movie in which we learn the giant leeches are taking their victims to an underwater cavern. They’re left there to be sucked dry of blood a bit at a time. It’s kind of eerie.

There are some decidedly loony moments:

Game warden Steve runs up to floozie Liz as she screams because she’s been frightened. But Steve, rather than holstering his pistol, points it right at Liz’s face as he comforts her.

Cal, the no-goodnik making time with Liz, is a dead ringer for comic Adam Carrolla.

Cal and Liz go out to a remote spot in the swamp – despite stories about the leech creatures – to make out … in a decision they make standing in the doorway of a bedroom. Young people these days!

Steve and pal Mike decide to go diving in the swamp to look for the giant leech creatures with scuba equipment they took from a ship belonging to “the Italian navy.” Huh?

The creatures usually have a fairly effective “rattle” noise they make, but early on one makes a sound like a cougar’s cry.

Check out “Attack of the Giant Leeches.” It’s drive-in schlock fun.

Classic shlock: ‘King Kong Escapes’

In these days of big-budget superhero and sci-fi movies with built-in appeal among young geeks, it’s hard to imagine that movies like “King Kong Escapes” once epitomized the pinnacle of monster movie making.

Okay, well maybe not the pinnacle. But they were our bread-and-butter monster movie in the 1960s.

Released in 1967 in Japan and 1968 here in the U.S. and re-released seemingly endlessly until it showed up in local TV station movie packages, “King Kong Escapes” was directed and produced by many of the creative folks behind the “Godzilla” movies in a puzzling 30-plus-years-after-the-fact attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the original “King Kong” and its sequels and follow-ups.

In other words, guys in suits grappling.

The movie’s story told how a maniacal mad scientist named Dr. Hu (pronounced Who!) needs King Kong – living peacefully, other than an occasional dust-up with a dinosaur, on an isolated island – to try to mine the mysterious Element X.

Along the way, we get James Bond-inspired shenanigans, American actors shoehorned into the plot, the most patently fake helicopters ever and a robot version of Kong that, inevitably, fights the real Kong.

The movie is of the “so bad it’s good” genre, particularly in its awful dubbing, unintentionally hilarious “cold” acting in a freezing jail cell and a performance that’s supposed to be stalwart from 1950s sci-fi actor Rhodes Reason as the American leading a team to bring the evil doctor to justice.

I’ve noted here before that genre entertainment can be marked “before” and “after” a few landmark films, including “Jaws” in 1975 and “Star Wars” in 1977. 

Even though it looks like it was made for the cost of a single set from a Spielberg or Lucas production, “King Kong Escapes” was the finest the genre had to offer just a few years before those films.

 

Dead in Hollywood: Avco Embassy Pictures

If you saw “This is Spinal Tap” or “Escape from New York” or “The Graduate” or “Phantasm” or “The Fog” or “Scanners” or “The Howling” in theaters – and if you didn’t get there late – you saw the Avco Embassy pictures logo at one time or another.

Blue and green geometric shapes swirling into place and into focus, the logo was a familiar one for devoted movie fans, particularly those with a taste for the low-budget and offbeat.

I still remember the anticipation I felt during the Avco Embassy logo at the beginning of John Carpenter’s “The Fog.” “Halloween” had become one of my favorite horror films of all time and I was looking forward to “The Fog.” I wasn’t disappointed, and I can still see that Avco Embassy logo in my head and will forever associate it with that movie.

Founded in 1942 by producer Joseph E. Levine as Embassy Pictures, the releasing company was more highbrow in its early years. The low-rent and fondly remembered period comes after 1967, when Levine sold the company to Avco and the stuff of low-budget dreams was born.

Under president Robert Rehme, the company released movies like “Scanners” and “Time Bandits” and “Phantasm.” Surely this was its heyday.

Norman Lear, creator of “All in the Family,” bought the company in 1982 and, for the most part, concentrated on television production.

Luckily for us, the studio’s best films live on. And so does that logo.

Unsung actors: William Boyett

William Boyett was one of those actors whose face – and even voice – was very recognizable. Yet few of us knew a name to attach to that enduring TV and movie presence.

Boyett, who passed in December 2004 at 77, had a long career playing stern or foreboding authority figures.

He’s best known as Sgt. MacDonald on the Jack Webb TV series “Adam-12.” Boyett had appeared on Webb’s “Dragnet” and became part of the actor/writer/producer’s repertory company of sturdy, dependable performers.

In the final decades of his life, he made a big impression on audiences who might not have known him as a man infected with a freaky alien presence in “The Hidden,” a wild 1987 science fiction thriller. If you haven’t seen it, seek it out. It’s worth the effort.

If Boyett was as much of a straight-arrow, by-the-book guy as the cops and military officers he portrayed, he’d be puzzled by my choice for favorite of his roles.

That would be a 1959 educational short, “Last Clear Chance,” in which he played a state police officer who tried to warn a family with young, first-time drivers about the dangers of crossing railroad tracks without looking properly. Of course, tragedy struck by the end of the short film.

It all added up to one of the best “Mystery Science Theater 3000” (MST3K) shorts.

Here’s to Bill Boyett, one of our favorite unsung actors.

iPhoneography: More on the Ski-Hi Drive-In

About a year ago I wrote about and posted some pictures of the Ski-Hi Drive-In, my community’s shuttered but last remaining drive-in theater – remaining, at least, in the sense of the shell of the screen tower and dilapidated concession stand/projection booth remain in place, where two highways meet north of Muncie.

Since that time I’ve talked to the owner of the property for an upcoming story for publication in my real job. He encouraged me to go onto the property and take pictures, so I thought I would share some here.

The back of the screen tower, which greeted patrons – and now looms over passersby – is in pretty rough shape. The owner told me there was an apartment at the base of the tower that someone once lived in.

It’s not that hard to imagine – and, for me, remember – movies playing out on the big screen framed by the Hoosier night sky.

You can still make out the earthen ridges made to elevate the front ends of patron’s cars, trucks and vans.

The concession stand exterior, with the expected graffiti.

The door broken in the past few years by intruders.

The concession stand is still recognizable, but has put up with a lot of abuse from vandals, the elements and years of neglect.

I’ll update you when I know something about the fate of this once-grand old drive-in movie theater.

Del Tenney, director of ‘Horror of Party Beach,’ dies

Word has reached monster movies fans of the death of director Del Tenney, who passed away in February at 82.

Tenney produced and directed several films, including a drive-in double-feature classic, “I Eat Your Skin,” but he was best known as the director of “The Horror of Party Beach,” a grandly silly 1964 exploitation movie that was often shown on a double feature with “The Curse of the Living Corpse.”

Tenney’s “The Horror of Party Beach” is one of those movies that could only have existed in the wild exploitation days of the 1960s, when drive-in theaters meant that even the lowest-budgeted, most ludicrous movies could be seen by millions of teenagers.

With its mix of Beach Boys-style rock and roll – courtesy of the Del Aires, who perform “The Zombie Stomp” in the movie – frantically dancing teens, beach blanket bingo and a biker gang, the movie had a little something for everyone.

Perhaps typical of a low-budget monster movie from the 1960s, “The Horror of Party Beach” seems pretty vague – or pretty confused – about what its monsters were. In the trailer alone, they’re referred to as atomic monsters, demons, the living dead and zombies. Huh?

The ads for the “Party Beach” and “Living Corpse” double-feature were among those that warned that, in order to see the movie, viewers had to release the theater from liability in the case moviegoers died from shock.

Tenney made his movies in the Stamford, Conn., area, and years after he lit up drive-in movie screens he made a (legitimate) name for himself, according to online obituaries, as a leading light in live theater. Henry Fonda made his last stage appearance in a production at the company that Tenney shepherded.

Here’s to Del Tenney. Our drive-in nightmares were better because of him.

Classic horror movie: ‘The Abominable Dr. Phibes’

The 1960s saw Vincent Price, who had appeared in films at the tail end of the 1930s and onward, experience the beginnings of a second life at the movies. He had made the popular 3-D movie “House of Wax” in 1953, but it was still a few years before he delivered back-to-back-to-back horror hits: “The Fly” in 1958. “House on Haunted Hill” in 1959 and more. Not to mention – although I will – a series of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations for American International Pictures in the 1960s.

So by the time “The Abominable Dr. Phibes” was released in 1971. Price was something of a horror institution. Like Boris Karloff before him, he had transcended the role of horror movie actor and become a personality.

So the Phibes movie, and its sequel, “Dr. Phibes Rises Again” – with their revenge-driven plots, gory killings and campy trappings – might have seemed a little out there, but Price could be counted on by American International Pictures to deliver an audience of horror fans.

Keep in mind, the Phibes movies came out at the tail end of a particular era in horror films. Within just a half-dozen years, John Carpenter’s “Halloween” and its many imitators changed horror movies forever. (I’m deliberately overlooking “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” in 1974 because the effectiveness of the film was considered a fluke, a very nearly dirty pleasure, like the porn films that flirted with social acceptance at the same time.)

The first Phibes movie acquainted us with the character Price would immortalize: He played Anton Phibes, a physician who was apparently burned to death in a car accident as he rushed to the side of his wife in emergency surgery.

Phibes survived, but was horribly disfigured. His wife did not survive her surgery. Now, years later, in 1925, Phibes and an always-silent assistant, Vulnavia (Virginia North), murder, one by one, the surgical team who Phibes believed botched his wife’s operation. Phibes’ revenge comes in the form of Biblical plagues: One doctor is stung to death by bees, while a nurse is eaten by locusts, for example.

As one of the doctors, played by Joseph Cotton, and Scotland Yard inspectors try to track him down, Phibes enacts his revenge and camps it up with Vulnavia and a clockwork orchestra even as his wife (a beautiful corpse played by cult movie actress Caroline Munro) awaits one final voyage with her beloved husband.

As oddball as “The Abominable Dr. Phibes” is, there’s a classic and classy feel to the movie because the murders are accomplished through such elaborate and arcane means. Within a few years, Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees and a host of other killers would chop and impale their victims and it all became so very ho-hum.

You might roll your eyes or even shake your head when Phibes enacts Biblical revenge on someone. But you won’t think, “Well, I’ve seen that before.”

‘Evil Dead’ remake: Trailer is released

Yeeesh.

Yes, Sam Raimi’s horror classic “The Evil Dead” is getting remade. Raimi, who more recently graduated to the likes of the (also recently rebooted) “Spider-Man” movies, is producing the remake, which comes out in April 2013.

Some observations on the “red band” – or age restricted – trailer:

Yes, yes, we all know that the original “Evil Dead” preceded “Cabin in the Woods” by about three decades. But I can’t get over how much this trailer reminds me of the horror movie set-up – certainly not the behind-the-scenes story – of “Cabin.”

First … there’s a cabin in the woods. Yes, I know. Right out of the original “Evil Dead.”

But there’s the whole “Don’t go into the basement” and “Don’t touch anything from the basement” deal. Again, I know what was below the trap door was part of the original movie. But still. It just conjures up memories. Just saying’.

Not surprisingly, this is one gory movie. Any movie that features a tongue-splitting is gory.

Freak out: Scary stuff that haunted me

Just ask anyone who’s ever walked up behind me when I was vacuuming and they’ll tell you I’m pretty easy to freak out.

Maybe it was the combination of an overactive imagination and a childhood home that was supposedly haunted, but I’ve always been spookable. I’m not squeamish; blood and gore don’t bother me particularly, especially not in horror movies.

But subtle stuff – a shadowy figure in the distance, a pallid face outside a window – in movies really makes me squirm.

Herewith, some stuff that freaked me out in my younger, impressionable years.

Lon Chaney in the 1925 “Phantom of the Opera.” Who wouldn’t be a little freaked out by that face? Mary Philbin and I were in good company in our reactions to Chaney’s masterpiece, both in terms of his film work and his makeup work. In Famous Monsters of Filmland I read all about how Chaney achieved this cadaverous look, manipulating his nose and cheekbones and eyes. But even though I knew Chaney’s secrets, that face made an impression.

The Suicide Song on Dr. Demento. If you’re not hep to what the nerdy kids listened to in the 1970s and 1980s, Dr. Demento hosted a syndicated radio show playing offbeat songs like “Fish Heads” and “Shaving Cream.” The oddball doctor introduced a nation of youngsters to the work of Spike Jones and helped launch the career of Weird Al Yankovic. But the song that Demento played that sticks with me, 30-plus years later, was “The Suicide Song.” What was it? Incredibly enough, I can’t seem to find it online. There’s a listing of songs played on the show that includes it but I can’t find an audio or video snippet, which makes me wonder if I’m mis-remembering the name. But once I hear the song again – and its dirge-like, monotone recitation of dire lyrics – I’ll get goosebumps all over again.

“Who are you?” from “Beyond the Door.” The 1974 Italian import “Beyond the Door” was considered little more than a rip-off of “The Omen” and “The Exorcist” with its plot about demonic possession. It’s a curiosity, maybe especially because of its star, British actress Juliet Mills, best known stateside for the sugary sitcom “Nanny and the Professor.” But when I think of “Beyond the Door,” I think of the late-night commercials for the movie showing clips of Mills levitating and twisting around and – unforgettably for me – intoning in a freaky bass voice “Who are  you?” I’m battling the heebie jeebies here.

The ghosts in “The Innocents.” I’m not sure any movie is scarier than “The Innocents,” director Jack Clayton’s adaptation of Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw.” The story of a governess going to a remote castle to take care of two truly strange children, “The Innocents” introduces a couple of the creepiest ghosts ever. And it does so in a totally freaky way: By having them stand, motionless, across ponds or outside windows.

I don’t know about you, but as far as I’m concerned, silent, unmoving figures watching me from a distance is more unnerving than a chainsaw-wielding maniac.

Unless he taps me on the shoulder while I’m running the vacuum cleaner.

 

Unsung actors: RIP Richard Lynch

Richard Lynch is another of those Hollywood actors whose name you might not recognize. But once you see his face, you think, “Yeah! I know that guy!”

With Lynch, who died this week at his home in Palm Springs, California, there was another reason he was so memorable.

Some of the obits for Lynch, who was 76, note his scarred face. Some attribute it to injuries he suffered in an accident in the 1960s.

Whatever the cause of Lynch’s unusual looks, he used those, his Draco Malfoy-blond hair and his distinctive voice – a mixture of distinctive and gravelly – to make an impression on a generation of movie and TV fans.

For me, Lynch was best known for playing a vampire reborn in modern-day in the 1979 TV thriller “Vampire.” I didn’t know until I read his obits that the TV movie, which was made on the cheap but had an impressive cast and some nice visuals, was a pilot for a TV series. It would have been cool to see Lynch menacing the show’s heroes each week.

Lynch was also familiar to geeks for his role as the villain in the low-budget sword-and-sorcery flick “The Sword and the Sorcerer,” released in 1982.

He had an impressive TV resume that included guest appearances on shows ranging from “The Streets of San Francisco” to “The Bionic Woman” to “Starsky and Hutch” to “Galactica 1980” to “The Fall Guy.”

More recently he starred in a lot of low-budget horror films and appeared in the Rob Zombie “Halloween” remake.

Richard Lynch might not get included in the “In Memoriam” video shown at next year’s Academy Awards. But he’s the kind of memorable character actor that the movie and TV industry is built on.