Attack of the Sci-Fi Turkeys!
Ah, the simple pleasures in life. Taking a stroll in the park. Picking flowers. Curling one’s toes in thick, lush grass.
Watching cheesy science fiction horror flicks from the 1950s and ’60s.
Thanks to a hiatus from regular and cable television, I’ve been enjoying a marathon of the latter, discovered in delicious abundance at YouTube.com. They’ve proved a great reminder of one of life’s meatier truths: The funniest things in life are those that are unintentionally so.
“Campy and low-budget,” as one YouTube commentator put it, these cult classics — the darlings of long-ago drive-in theaters — distinguished themselves via obscure actors (with some exceptions), thrown-together-in-a-day plots, wooden dialogue, anticlimactic climaxes and, best of all, cheesy monster costumes. Call them the old-time versions of the made-for-Syfy-Channel stinkers of today. No Sharknados, Piranhacondas, Dinocrocs, Supergators or Mansquitos back then: There was The Crawling Eye, The Man Without a Body, The Giant Claw. And, although they were guilty of sexism and a touch of cheesecake here and there — these old B movies were gore-free and also lacked blue language and sex scenes.
The cheesy classic that put me on the road to fanship was the one authors Michael and Harry Medved considered the worst movie of all time: Ed Wood Jr.’s Plan 9
From Outer Space (1959), in which aliens came down to resurrect dead people in an attempt to stop earthlings from creating a weapon — “Solobonite” — that would mess up the whole universe. (Yeah. I know.) Wood’s sins in making the movie were myriad … finding a taller, thinner man to complete the scenes featuring Bela Lugosi after the actor’s death in 1956; scripts and boom-microphone shadows making it into the film; looped footage and conflicting day and night scenes, to name a few.
But it wasn’t Plan 9 that I went looking for on YouTube those few fateful months ago. I sought that masterpiece The Creeping Terror (1964). According to Wikipedia,
The Creeping Terror also graces the “worst films of all time” list. Its YouTube synopsis says it all: “A huge walking carpet — er, alien from an advanced civilization — comes to Earth where people commit suicide by climbing into its mouth — er, it eats people. Yeah.”
True, the monster, a cross between a giant slug and a dinosaur, looks as though it was was created by some acid-dropping seamstress … an enormous, dilapidated rug complete with fins and what looks like Slinkies dangling from its head. To move so dang slowly and awkwardly, it sure got to eat a lot of people. And yes, the actors appeared at times to be struggling to get into the thing’s mouth, which was about where its tummy appeared to be.
The monster effects aren’t much better in the movie Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959). Set in Florida gator country, it’s a tale of a couple of bloodsuckers that feast on the locals after dragging them down into an underwater cave. The monsters: guys in black, cone-headed garbage-bag suits accented with giant Clarisonic brushes. Then there was Robot Monster (1953), which tried to justify its stinkiness by masquerading as a young boy’s crazy dream. The robot monster wears a thought-provoking ensemble consisting of a gorilla suit, old-timey diving helmet and a lady’s stocking on his face for extra authenticity. Then there’s The Horrors of Spider Island (1960), a “galsploitation” flick about a dance group that improbably survives a plane crash, ends up on a deserted island and is terrorized by their male manager after he’s bitten by an Alaskan king-crab-size spider whose fakeness heads up the “horrors” mentioned in the movie title.
Comments made by You-Tubers about these gems:
“I think that the only way that this film would be bearable to watch again is if the individual was completely drunk.”
“The FBI should save this movie and substitute it for use against suspected terrorists. It would be far more effective than water boarding.”
“You need to include a warning for this movie for those of us who are lactose intolerant!”
“I think this even tops Ed Wood’s work.”
“I should have skipped the movie and just read the comments!”
Sure, there are better things to do. Sweating the economy. Trying to come up with a way to end world hunger. Figuring out new sources of cheap energy.
But first, let me check out Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, wouldja?