This week's movie - Night Fright

This week's mad movie is another exercise in independent filmmaking, this time in 1968 in Dallas Texas with Night Fright from director James Sullivan. James had worked on low budget indy films before, on several Larry Buchanan films and as an editor on Manos the Hands of Fate (another Texas production). In his directorial debut he makes a good old fashioned creature feature about a government satellite that crash lands and brings back a vicious space monster that begins killing the teens in the small town of Satan's Hollow, TX. It's up to the town sheriff, played by John Agar, to stop it.

There's two main things going for this film: 1, plenty of monster time, and 2. John Agar. You can never go wrong with good ole John Agar. Unfortunately the film suffers from slow pacing, no doubt in an effort to get it to feature length. I still really like this one, and appreciate the independent film gusto to get out and make a monster movie. We need more of those nowadays!

This week's movie - Killers from Space

 This week's mad movie i the Cinetarum - click to watch:

This week's mad movie...

 We have a new episode in the Cinetarium this week, fright fans, the 1954 sci fi schlocker Killers from Space.

Killers from space tells the story of a nuclear scientist named Dr. Douglas Martin (Peter Graves) whose plane goes down while doing nuclear testing. He is presumed dead, but mysteriously reappears one day, at a loss to explain how he survived. As he recovers he unwittingly stumbles onto a plot to destroy mankind by a race of aliens who have set up a secret underground base on Earth. Or so he says - is the Doc telling the truth, or is he hysterical and hallucinating from the crash?

Tune in here to find out Saturday night at 9 central/8 Eastern time, and keep watching the skies!!

This week in the lab we get a visit from the skies...

This week's dose of horror therapy comes via director Ed Wood Jr. with the 1959 Sci-Fi classic "Plan 9 from Outer Space." Alien invaders resurrect the dead to do their bidding - among the corpses brought back are Bela Lugosi, Vampira, and Tor Johnson. 

They're the best part of the film, to be honest, although the Bela scenes make little sense and are shoehorned in just to get a name actor into the film. In fact, it's actually footage of Bela that Wood shot earlier, unrelated to the movie. Bela passed away prior to shooting, so Ed figured he'd find a way to get what footage he had into the movie. It works... sort of. 

The entire film is entertaining in its own weird way, despite the cardboard tombstones, hokey sets, wooden acting and juvenile script. Or perhaps because of it. In hindsight those very attributes are the things that draw people to this film almost 65 years after its release. The amateurish touches make it a charming viewing, and the weird cast is oddly compelling. The film has a sincerity in it that is lacking in films that try to be "so bad they're good." You can't set out to make something like that, it never works. Wood and company set out to make the best film they could, and in the process made an enjoyable, if somewhat silly, picture that's still entertaining audiences to this day. Here's to you, Ed!

February's movies in the Cinetarium...!

Keep watching the skies for an otherworldly lineup of alien invasion films this month on Dr. Gangrene's Cinetarium - every Saturday night at 9pm central (10 eastern) right here and on the Necat Roku Channel.