vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
We showed you the U.S. promo poster for I Married a Monster from Outer Space when we discussed the film a while back. Above is the really nice Australian daybill, with beautiful colors and lovely design. Someone deserved to be credited for this, but nobody knows who painted it. Or at least, we don’t. There’s no Australian premiere date, but it was probably sometime in 1959.
South African born actress Glynis Barber is seen here in two publicity photos made in London for her late 1970s-early 1980s British sci-fi television series Blake’s 7. They were made in 1981, and though they date later than images we typically feature, we like them, so here they are.
Journey to the Center of the Earth, derived from 1864 source material by French author Jules Verne, is an iconic adventure film that resides in the fun zone between known science and complete fancy. It premiered today in 1959 and starred James Mason, Pat Boone, and Arlene Dahl, who portray a set of intrepid explorers circa 1880 that travel to Iceland—a place we’ve spent some time and absolutely love—and plan to enter the Earth by lowering themselves into the stratovolcano Snæfellsjökull. They soon discover that there’s a competing explorer, as well as unknown parties willing to kill. They deal with those setbacks, but as Mason and his group consign themselves to the depths there’s someone dangerous on their trail.
This is an absurd movie, but it’s absurd fun. The speculative nature of what lies beneath the terrestrial crust is convincingly rendered thanks to fanciful sets, large scale matte backdrops, De Luxe color processing, and CinemaScope widescreen. When we say convincing, we mean it works because most of what you see is physically real, even if it’s largely plaster and paint. What didn’t work for us was cheesy-ass Boone as the movie’s shirtless sex appeal. Even the Pulp Intl. girlfriends thought he was too milquetoast (there’s a word you don’t see much anymore, but PI-1 did in fact utter it). For our part, we concentrated on Miss Dahl. Overall, Journey to the Center of the Earth is a good night of fun. Suspend disbelief and enjoy.
Two thoughts here. First, we really wish we could go back in time and have the job of making 1960s prop sci-fi guns. They’re so fun. No need to look practical at all. A beam of light added by the efx department and you’re good. We’d love to have this example on a shelf. Second, a good thing about this site is that it makes us seek out films beyond the obvious ones. Jane Fonda is best known for Barbarella, Klute, On Golden Pond, and maybe 9 to 5, but she was a staple in cinemas, and we’ve gotten to appreciate her choices and range over the years. Everything from Les félins to Coming Home to They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? to Youth were interesting at a minimum, and great often. Oh, and a third thing: Fonda was one of the hottest phenomena on Earth or in space around the time she made this photo in 1968. See more Barbarella shots here, here, here, and here. Why so many? Because the movie is like a costume design orgy, which makes every promo image worth seeing.
In another example of a low budget throwaway movie having brilliant promo art, above is a poster for the Mexican sci-fi flick El planeta de las mujeres invasoras, aka Planet of the Female Invaders, which premiered today in 1966 amidst a wave of similar films with smoking hot female aliens. The genius who created this piece of art is not known. We mean we don’t know. Someone else might. If you’re that special someone, clue us in, would you? We’d like to identify this person and seek out more of their work.
Plotwise, you get what’s advertised. Creatures from the planet Sibila, led by Lorena Velázquez, land their flying saucer in a carnival, disguise it as a ride called Viaje a la Luna, and make off with any unfortunates who wander aboard. This is an extremely random way to select humans, which is why they end up with three gangsters in their midst. This trio has followed someone onto the ship, a boxer they plan to lay low for failing to take a dive in the ring.
Also aboard are Fat Man and Little Boy—not the bombs, but rather cinematic stereotypes meant to inject the film with comic relief and pathetic innocence, respectively. The gangsters are funny too, actually. They keep hitting their noses on doors. This entire group and a couple of randoms are blasted into space while the rubes in the carnival gawp in astonishment. Terror awaits the abductees, as Velázquez and company plan to steal their lungs. Getting good lungs from Mexico is like getting good livers from the Czech Republic. You can make a more informed choice.
But super-advanced, hyper-intelligent beings always overlook flaws in their plans. In addition to not checking regional air quality, Velázquez didn’t confirm that her twin sister (also Velázquez ) was down with the whole cruel program. If the Earthlings are to be saved, it’ll be with help from the inside. Also needing help from the inside was the production, writing, and acting team, but alas, none was forthcoming, and the result was a truly terrible movie. But it’s one you can make funny if you have the improvisational skills. Invite your friends and see if you’re as clever as you think.
Once again it’s time for some good old fashioned ’50s sci-fi, and of the cheesiest brand too, because what other kind was there? Last night we watched I Married a Monster from Outer Space—which is a top contender in the fun titles sweepstakes—and were well entertained by a tale headlined by Tom Tryon and Gloria Talbot about a bridegroom being parasitically occupied by a mistlike extraterrestrial the night before his wedding.
Because possession never goes off without a hitch, Talbot picks up on a few clues something is amiss with her fiancée. Her betrothed’s thoughts always seem to be somewhere far away. Dogs hate him. He hates dogs (and no wonder, as things develop). He hates cats too. He wanders off in the middle of the night—and not to a bar, which would make him very human. After a year of marriage and, presumably, regular sessions with her husband’s deep space nine, Talbot starts to wonder why she hasn’t gotten pregnant, and what her hubby is doing with his away hours.
Turns out Tryon is just one of many aliens taking over the fictional town of Norrisville, and their purpose is—wang dang sweet poontang! They can no longer reproduce because their females died, thus they hope to match their DNA through experimentation with that of human women and continue to propagate their species. Pretty soon the aliens have taken over everything—the cops, the telegraph office, the soda fountain, everything crucial. The few humans left in town are soon cut off from the outside world.
Though we make it sound silly, this is a much better movie than last week’s The Amazing Colossal Man. It contains many of the same plot beats as the classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which came two years earlier, but the fact that it’s derivative doesn’t mean it’s dismissible. It’s reasonably well acted, more than competently shot, and the story works well within its setting. We think it was worth the time and popcorn expended. Try it and see if you don’t think the same. I Married a Monster from Outer Space premiered today in 1958
I bet she’s younger than me.
Film historians and sociologists alike claim mid-century sci-fi films were largely about Cold War anxiety and fear of nuclear annihilation. Well, probably. There was also an interest in using improved special effects in order to advance storytelling possibilities. Hollywood made about five hundred sci-fi movies between 1948 and 1962, and the sci-fi story form, even before the Cold War, often involved invasion or technological disaster.
But many post-nuclear movies actually were about nuclear fear. Godzilla, for example. And the U.S. film The Day the Earth Caught Fire, about two nuclear tests pushing the planet toward the Sun. Susan Sontag once wrote that, “Alongside the hopeful fantasy of moral simplification and international unity embodied in the science fiction films, lurk the deepest anxieties about contemporary existence.” So we’ll buy it.
That brings us to Bert I. Gordon’s schlock sci-fi classic The Amazing Colossal Man, which is about an army colonel played by Glenn Langan who’s accidentally exposed to the pulse of a plutonium bomb, after which he grows to sixty feet in height and eighteen-thousand pounds. Thankfully the army is good at “expandable sarongs,” as the movie puts it, though there’s no word on whether they also built enormous toilets.
Standing by Langan’s side through thick and thicker is loyal fiancée Cathy Downs, trying to be supportive as he slowly loses his marbles. Army eggheads eventually find a cure, but not before Langan runs away into the Nevada desert, headed for Las Vegas. They chase him down in order to inject him using a humongous syringe containing the first dose of a two-stage cure, but things aren’t as easy in practice as they are on paper.
And the same could be said about filmmaking, but even if this one will induce occasional smirks among viewers, it must be noted that it was a box office success, pulling in four times its production budget. That budget? $138,000. Pretty low, and it shows. The projection effects required to make Langan sixty feet tall worked, more or less, but everything else screams shoestring.
In a sign of the film’s relative quality, it was skewered on Mystery Science Theater 3000, with a better result than the original. But the movie fits Sontag’s thesis perfectly. As she noted, “Science fiction films may also be described as a popular mythology for the contemporary negative imagination about the impersonal.” The Amazing Colossal Man is negative in the extreme, and it exudes terror of the impersonal. It premiered today in 1957.
This rare promo poster is signed by Italian illustrator Giuliano Nistri, who we think only produced the background, considering it’s obviously a production image. The movie is Saturn 3, a sort of forgotten British sci-fi adventure from the early 1980s. How to describe it. A little bit Star Wars, a little bit Alien, and a little bit 2001: A Space Odyssey is probably how it was pitched to the studios. The actual result was a little more like b-movies such as Star Crash and Battle Beyond the Stars. But it starred Kirk Douglas, helped launch Harvey Keitel, and had Farrah Fawcett, seen here being brutally suspended by the movie’s deranged AI robot.
The immediate post-Star Wars period was a time when even well known performers had to look twice at cheeseball sci-fi scripts. No actor wanted to miss out on the next cultural phenomenon. That’s the only way to explain Douglas’s involvement. Sadly for him, Saturn 3 came up about 887 million miles short of achieving any lasting impact. Other than a convincingly scary robot, Douglas’s naked ass, and Fawcett wearing a series of negligees and other scanty items, it didn’t offer much of note. At least back then. But these days, the AI that copies its programmer’s worst traits seems plenty relevant. After its U.S. premiere in February 1980, Saturn 3 made a controlled burn into Italy today the same year.
Was Star Trek the greatest sci-fi series ever aired? We think so, though there have been other great ones. But even if Star Trek wasn’t the best, it was the most topical and groundbreaking, with its anti-war and anti-racism allegories, diverse crew, and costumes that pushed the bounds of censorship. The two shots above are from the 1967 episode “City on the Edge of Forever,” written by Harlan Ellison and considered by many fans to be the pinnacle of the series. In the photo are Enterprise crew members looking at the Guardian of Forever, an eternal being that records all of history and acts as a gateway for those who wish to observe the past firsthand.
When Doctor McCoy suffers an accidental drug overdose that makes him psychotic he leaps through the gateway to a past Earth. At that moment the Enterprise, which is in orbit, disappears. Somehow McCoy has changed Earth’s past, and caused the ship—possibly all of humanity—to wink out of existence. The crew members have no choice but to follow McCoy into the past to try and stop him from doing whatever altered history. Spock refers to that past—the 1920s—as “a rather barbaric time.” We wonder what he would think if he came from the future to the 2020s? We have a feeling the word “barbaric” wouldn’t suffice.
Above are three tateken sized posters for the first three films in George Lucas’s galaxy spanning Star Wars series: Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Return of the Jedi. Posting these today was a direct consequence of our recent move—new house, fresh reorganization, all sorts of forgotten items turning up, both physically and in our hard drives. Once we get in a solid scanner groove we have some amazing stuff to show you. In the meantime, we’re pretty sure you won’t see these anywhere else.
The Human Be-In takes place in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park with between 20,000 to 30,000 people in attendance, their purpose being to promote their ideals of personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, communal living, ecological preservation, and higher consciousness. The event is considered the beginning of the famed counterculture Summer of Love.
Johnny Cash performs live at Folsom State Prison in Folson, California, where he records a live album that includes a version of his 1955 hit “Folsom Prison Blues.” Cash had always been interested in performing at a prison, but was unable to until personnel changes at his record company brought in people who were amenable to the idea. The Folsom album was Cash’s biggest commercial success for years, reaching number 1 on the country music charts.
British serial killer Harold Shipman is found dead in his prison cell, after hanging himself with a bedsheet. Shipman, a former doctor who preyed on his patients, was one of the most prolific serial killers in history, with two-hundred and eighteen murders positively attributed to him, and another two-hundred of which he is suspected.
English novelist Nevil Shute, who wrote the books A Town Like Alice and The Pied Piper, dies in Melbourne, Australia at age sixty-one. Seven of his novels were adapted to film, but his most famous was the cautionary post-nuclear war classic On the Beach.
Dr. James Bedford, a University of California psychology professor, becomes the first person to be cryonically preserved with intent of future resuscitation. Bedford had kidney cancer that had metastasized to his lungs and was untreatable. His body was maintained for years by his family before being moved to Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona.
Jack Gilbert Graham is executed in Colorado, U.S.A., for killing 44 people by planting a dynamite bomb in a suitcase that was subsequently loaded aboard United Airlines Flight 629. The flight took off from Denver and exploded in mid-air. Graham was executed by means of poison gas in the Colorado State Penitentiary, in Cañon City.
