Season 5

If this seems like the worst possible premise for a low budget western/horror hybrid film, you'll be astonished to hear it was half of a 1966 double feature along with Billy The Kid Versus Dracula. These were the last two films by William 'One Shot' Beaudine, who directed such screen dogs as Rin-Tin-Tin, Lassie and Jean Parker in a career that stretched from silent films to colour television. Beaudine was dubbed 'One Shot' not because he did everything in one take, but because the quick and cheap approach made it look that way. Tonight's film, shot in a mere eight days, is no exception.

This week's exciting presentation is a swampy classic from 1959 ripped straight from the dripping fundaments of Roger Corman's basement. At last, a film for men in rubber raincoats, made by men in rubber raincoats! I am extremely proud...no, that's not the word. Ah! I'm extremely hesitant to present for your enjoyment Attack Of The Giant Leeches. No doubt you're thinking with a title like that it's a parable subtly highlighting how the power elite live off trusting poor people, directed by some genuine left-winger like Ken Loach. Well, it's not. It's actually more like Madame Bovary with a monster.

It's an atmospheric supernatural thriller based on a traditional recipe handed down from my old pumpkin-headed friend, the late great Edgar Allan Poe, but the resulting dish is a rather cheesy story about revenge from beyond the grave - much like every other Italian horror movie from the sixties. Nevertheless, it has all the right ingredients. Blood, guts, Barbara Steele in a bath tub, murders, the undead, Barbara Steele in a sheet, severed crawling hands, plague, beautiful landscape photography and Barbara Steele. All lovingly half-baked into Terror-Creatures From The Grave.

The admirers of the novels of my old friend H.G. Wells have yet to forgive Mister Gordon for twice-murdering the same book, first as Village Of The Giants in 1965, and then again in 1976 under it's original title The Food Of The Gods. Although it's far from being Herbert's best work, it certainly didn't deserve that fate! Hopefully you'll be able to put aside the righteous indignation and craving for revenge, and calmly watch Tormented, which is a ghost story. Yes, I too was taken aback by that revelation. When I discovered there was a Bert I. Gordon film with absolutely no giants of any kind, well, I haven't been so surprised since the night I found an alien mind parasite in my dustbin - but that's another story.

The plot is paced quickly enough that we rarely notice its jagged edges don't quite fit together. Tania's notion of creating a monster to not only vindicate her father's theories but also to clean up his mess makes for a nice twist on an old story. If the monster is rather too obviously composed of mortician's wax, a glass eye and rubber gloves, it's at least a novel concept for the Frankenstein Monster. And I should mention the suspiciously modern-looking hats the men wear and their amazingly fake sideburns. Nothing says '19th Century' like strange facial hair and obvious spirit gum.

I bring you tidings of comfort and joy, for tonight I present a good film, which like Christmas, only happens once a year. It was effectively remade in 3-D as House Of Wax with Vincent Price in 1953 and...that's where they should have stopped, really. The 2005 House Of Wax had more in common with Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and it's only real redeeming feature is the demise of Paris Hilton. Really, a spike through the brain shouldn't have killed her, she wasn't using it, after all.

I have to admit, compared to many of the films I've presented, this one isn’t so bad. For instance, the film is only eighty-three minutes long, and the filmmakers put some work into it, supplying us with a large number of suspects and making sure that everybody is acting suspiciously at all times. The only practical way to figure out who the werewolf is, is by simply waiting until everyone but the villain has been killed off.

It strikes me that Planet Outlaws is like a male fantasy come to life. Just think of it - Buck gets to take a nice five-hundred-year-long sleep-in. With my busy schedule, I'm ecstatic if I can get twenty minutes nap on the weekend. Then, when he wakes up, Buck is the smartest, most dynamic guy around. In reality he'd be treated like something that's escaped from the zoo. And finally, everyone needs Buck to go on exciting missions, fight the bad guys, test exotic equipment and crash rocket ships. Out of the half-dozen flights Buck makes, he only lands successfully once.

You might be asking yourself how anyone could possibly make an unbearably boring movie about zombies in Cambodia, amongst the majestic ruins of Angkor Wat. It’s an awfully tall order, but the Halperins found a way. Here's how. This time the zombies are merely a figure of speech, and the film doesn’t really take place in Cambodia so much as in front of obviously enlarged picture postcards! I haven't felt so cheated since I shoplifted U2's last album.

Killers From Space may well be the first alien abduction movie. UFOs were on people's minds in 1954, and yet abductions were not the UFO headlines of the time. They were contactees like George Adamski, who met a peaceful long-haired blonde male alien from Venus out in the desert in 1952. His claim made the headlines less than two years after the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still. Killers From Space wants very badly to be a Martian Manchurian Candidate and, with somebody like Jack Arnold in the director’s chair, there’s a good chance that that’s exactly what it would have been. But instead, Killers From Space got stuck with W. Lee Wilder’s virtuoso tedium and half-assedness.

The story is lame, the acting is terrible, the dubbing is worse, and there are more minor characters than a Charles Dickens novel. One of the major problems with War Of The Planets is the huge number of throw-away characters who shuffle anonymously across the screen to their inevitable doom. The one character that dominates the film is the seemingly indestructible Captain Alex, played by John Richardson. You may remember him being far more sophisticated and articulate playing Tumak in One Million Years BC. As with many Italian films from this era, everyone in this movie is actually speaking English, but their accents were so thick that the dialogue was re-dubbed by voice actors so it would be understandable. This practice was so common, when Mad Max was re-dubbed for American audiences a lot of people thought it was an Italian production.

Imagine waking-up in an English hospital after having eye surgery to discover the world's population had been ravaged by unstoppable flesh-eating monsters! And if that's not a bad enough way to start the day, there lurks a terror from beyond at the bottom of the garden path. No doubt some of you out there with shorter memories are thinking "Good lord, Nigel's going to screen 28 Days Later!" Well, you'd be half-right...the "Good lord, Nigel's going to screen" half. Director Danny Boyle told me he was inspired to make 28 Days Later in 2002 after watching this week's gold-class presentation.

Steven Lisberger is the same hack who brought us Tron which, although very pretty, was bad science and worse fiction. Given Tron’s eventual popularity, you’d think it would have launched Mister Lisberger’s film-making career. It didn't. In a Hollywood career that spans three decades, Mister Lisberger has only ever made four films, the fourth and final nail in his coffin I present for you tonight. I'm talking about Slipstream, a post-apocalyptic science fiction film released in 1989, which has a remarkable cast featuring Mark Hamill, Bob Peck, Bill Paxton, Robbie Coltrane, the gorgeous Kitty Aldridge and even Oscar winners Ben Kingsley and F. Murray Abraham in small roles. Yet Slipstream is virtually a forgotten film.