Teenage Caveman | Episode 385

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Teenage Caveman | Episode 385

Jim reflects on a Roger Corman classic from 1958 – “Teenage Caveman,” starring Robert Vaughn, Darah Marshall, Leslie Bradley, Frank De Kova,June Jocelyn, Jonathan Haze,Beach Dickerson, Ed Nelson and Robert Shayne. In a land of dinosaurs, a young primitive man questions his clan’s laws and seeks to explore the “forbidden regions” nearby. Find out more on this episode of MONSTER ATTACK!, The Podcast Dedicated To Old Monster Movies.

How to Make a Monster (1958) & Teenage Caveman (1958) Double Feature Pressbook

HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER was our first meta-movie and it came at us from AIP, writer Herman Cohen and director Herbert L. Strock. Take a listen to some of the audio we had to cut from the final episode!

Kaiju Week in Review (October 22-28, 2023)

Another Godzilla Day, another short from Kazuhiro Nakagawa to keep the series' tokusatsu roots alive. Fest Godzilla 4: Operation Jet Jaguar will see the grinning robot battle the King of the Monsters in live-action for the first time ever. I think that's why seeing the Final Wars Godzilla opposite a replica Jet Jaguar suit is even more surreal than his bout against the Showa Gigan last year. When the short drops on November 3, be sure to download it ASAP, because Toho doesn't like to keep them up for long.

I already posted about the unbelievable Movie Monster Series Bagan figure revealed last night, but it was accompanied by four more new figures: a glittery MinusGoji, an 8-inch black Kiryu, a quadrupedal Landing Stage Hedorah, and this year's fan poll winner, Flower Beast Form Biollante. The Kiryu is a homage to a theater-exclusive figure from Godzilla: Tokyo SOS, though it actually has more paint apps. They're all Godzilla Store exclusives.

TOHO Visual Entertainment has released Godzilla (1954) and Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964) on 4K, the first of a flurry of Godzilla titles debuting in 4K this year. (There's also a Blu-ray for each that uses the same 4K restoration.) The people I turn to for judgment on these things (@spacehunter-m, @tohocompanylimited-blog, and a few others) aren't thrilled, especially with Mothra vs. Godzilla, which compares unfavorably with the HD version of the shorter Toho Champion Festival cut. Both are improvements over what was previously available on home video, but that's not saying much.

Mothra vs. Godzilla unfortunately does not include the Frontier Missile scene as a bonus feature. (Don't know what all those nice-looking screenshots of it from the recent Mothra vs. Godzilla Completion book were about then.) It does offer eight-and-a-half minutes of unused effects footage, some of it making its home video debut, as well as four more minutes of set footage and a theater showing the film. Both films offer a ton of trailers, the most interesting of which is an export trailer for G54. Some of the ballyhoo ("incredible titan of terror!") would later be used for the U.S. release, and @biorante discovered that the subtitles are a near-exact match with the old BFI DVD. So it's possible to almost exactly recreate what the film would have looked like when it screened in, say, Honolulu in 1955.

This is strictly local news, but I know some of you are fellow upstate New Yorkers, so I'm throwing it in anyway. Rochester's Little Theatre will be showing Destroy All Monsters on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. This'll be the first Godzilla film I've seen there since Rialto distributed the original in 2004. The runtime and release date match the AIP version, so fingers crossed they landed the same 35mm print that screened at the Mahoning this summer.

Big week coming up, though even bigger if you live in Japan. For the Americans reading this, a reminder that Godzilla 2000 is in theaters the night of November 1.

Poll: Favourite Classic Horror/Monster Movie Studio?

Paul Blaisdell (standing)- the DAY THE WORLD ENDED (1956)

For some reason, this is my favorite AIP monster movie.

The Price May Be Right - Number 4

Welcome to “The Price May Be Right!” I’ve been counting down My Top 31 Favorite Vincent Price Performances & Appearances! The countdown will cover movies, TV productions, and many more forms of media. We’re getting closer to the end now… Today we focus on Number 4: Prince Prospero, from Masque of the Red Death.

Alongside “Comedy of Terrors,” this is quite possibly my favorite Vincent Price movie of all time. It is, without any doubt, my favorite entry in the Corman-Poe Cycle of features from AIP. Combining elements of the titular story with another tale from Poe, “Hop-Frog” (here referred to as “Hop-Toad,” presumably so the character doesn’t sound like a children’s game), “Masque of the Red Death” is easily the most thought-provoking and philosophical of all the Poe movies. It’s a film that seems less interested in outright scaring you, and more interested in posing a lot of interesting and unnerving questions. It’s a film about faith, corruption, mortality, ethics, and karmic justice, and the way it presents its different themes and ideas is still just as interesting today as it was back when it was made. In fact, in some ways, I would argue this movie is stronger than it ever was before. Released in 1964 – the year after “Comedy of Terrors” – the story focuses on Price’s character, Prince Prospero. The Prince is the cruel and sadistic ruler of some unknown province in Italy, and the leader of a Satanic cult. When a plague known as the Red Death – which makes people sweat blood till they die from exsanguination – strikes his kingdom, Prospero summons all the members of his cult to his palace, and locks them all away inside his castle to try and escape the plague. Also involved is a young lady named Francesca, whom Prospero kidnaps after her father and fiancé each try to stand up to him. Prospero has all three brought to his castle, to try and devise some unusual punishment for the two men, all while he tries to teach Francesca the truth of the world, as he sees it. Prospero is a truly fascinating villain. In some ways, he is one of the most evil characters Price ever played: he is callous to the core, willing to stab virtually anyone in the back and showing neither pity nor remorse for any of the evil acts he commits. When people who think themselves his friends die either directly or indirectly due to his actions, he shows no recognition of the relationship they used to share. But at the same time, there is a deeper philosophy at work with him: Prospero’s belief is that people are inherently wicked, and that the world is a cruel place of injustice and despair. He believes that God is dead, and that Satan already rules the universe. So, he behaves in a manner he believes would please Satan, just the way any Christian tries to behave in a manner they believe would please God. There are glimmers of something less than totally evil inside Prospero, however. He seems to value true innocence, in a backwards sort of way, and shows respect for anyone who can match the fervor of his own horrible faith. His relationship with Francesca is truly intriguing: it’s a sort of twisted and warped take on “Beauty and the Beast,” as Prospero admires Francesca’s faith and purity. And it is true admiration: when one of his allies suggests he enjoys corrupting her, Prospero replies, “Not corrupting…instructing.” At the same time, while Francesca is frightened of Prospero and appalled by his actions, she does come to have a sense of understanding towards him and his cynical outlook on the world. She is the closest thing to love Prospero has ever felt, and he is someone she realizes is more than just a monster. Prospero also shows other signs of right thinking: he refuses to harm children, and whenever he kills people who might be afflicted with the red death, he seems to consider it a mercy. In my opinion, Prospero is one of the greatest movie villains of all time; an underappreciated cinematic titan of tyranny that really deserves more credit. And it’s just as much a testament to Price as an actor, as well as the writing and direction, that he is such a uniquely depraved and yet intriguing character. Vincent plays the character absolutely pitch perfect, rarely hamming anything up too much (I say “rarely” because…well…it’s Vincent Price), and giving Prospero an elegance and calculating intellectuality that belies his more sinister qualities. He balances the character’s vulnerabilities and cruel heartlessness splendidly, so that we do come to empathize with Prospero, despite his unholy and horrid ways. When this villain meets his defeat, it is satisfying, yet also saddening. That is a sign you have created a truly magnificent evildoer. Tomorrow, the countdown enters the Top 3!

Film Ranking and Retrospective

So, after evaluating all twelve Gamera films based on purely objective metrics like turtle spin velocity, character development, how much I cried, number of potential sapphic relationships, and least amount of tapeworm, here they are from favorite to least favorite:

Gamera the Brave

Gamera: Guardian of the Universe

Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris

Gamera 2: Advent of Legion

Gamera: Super Monster

Gamera vs. Zigra

Gamera vs. Guiron

Gamera vs. Barugon

Giant Monster Gamera

Gamera vs. Gyaos

Gamera vs. Viras

Gamera vs. Jiger

Gamera the Brave takes the top spot for being so much more than it needed to be, perhaps taking a few steps outside what makes a typically good monster movie to just be an all-around great film. Of course, the Heisei trilogy still aren’t far behind, balancing the two a lot better than the Brave does and building an excellent cast of characters to the point that the hardest decision on this entire list, and the one I’m most likely to go back on at any moment, is ranking these three films against each other. Super Monster reaches for the stars just like the Brave does, daring to be something wholly unique despite its objective flaws, and is held back only by a gut punch ending after the likes of which I can’t actually make myself put it higher than the Heisei films. And of course, the rest of the Showa films are still going to end up ranked lower by being products of their time and having a relatively limited approach to in-depth storytelling, but there are still some I find exceptional for more unique reasons than I once thought I would. I even genuinely like most of Jiger, it’s just so much sensory hell it can be tricky to watch.

But my goals during this extended fixation weren’t really centered on pitting the films against each other - there was a lot of discovery, too. About halfway through March I did something I hadn’t expected I’d want to at the beginning, and bought myself the Arrow Video complete Showa era collection, mainly to get a physical copy of Super Monster but also with the bonus of getting to see Japanese versions of all eight films. In fact, I’ve now seen the Showa films probably just about any way one can see them, be that the subtitled original Japanese version, the AIP dub or first import English version, the Daiei pre-international dub (which I’ve learned is a more accurate term than “Sandy Frank”), the MST3K edition, the MST3K KTMA edition, the MST3K Fanmade edition, or specifically in Gamera: Super Monster’s case, the Elvira’s Movie Macabre edition or the Cinema Insomnia edition that’s missing a whole third of the movie.

That’s quite a lot of watching the Showa movies, and I think really a big theme for all of this was gaining a better appreciation of those films, specifically Noriaki Yuasa and his vision. He imagined Gamera as a hero for children, specifically because, as a child himself, living through the second World War and its aftermath, he came to believe adults were untrustworthy and too easily swayed by propaganda, and if that doesn’t make him the most relatable kaiju film directer of all time I don’t know what could possibly top it. Screw Gamera: Rebirth, the next one should be Gamera vs. Fox News.

Oh, right, speaking of which, I haven’t talked about that, either. And that’s because most of the major reasons I like the existing Gamera films so much tend to be more happenstance, and have little to do with how well they’ve followed the franchise formula. So far, nothing about Gamera: Rebirth has told me anything about how well it will handle its human characters, whether any of their stories will be relatable to me personally, whether it’ll have a strong environmental stance like Zigra, and actually with what we’ve seen of the cast, it seems like there aren’t going to be too many women in this series at all. Of course, that could always change, and there’s always a chance the one lady we’ve seen in the trailers could be compelling enough on her own to still make it a favorite, like with Mai in Gamera the Brave, but we won’t know anything for sure until release. But if, as seems most likely, Rebirth really is just a throwback to the early Showa era, I think now I can be a little more okay with that.

(I do actually quite like the monster designs revealed thus far. If I ever go back and write that possible Gamera vs. the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sequel, there’s a good chance of that magenta Neo-Jiger showing up in the Triceraton arena).

I think, if I were to put into words what makes Gamera unique among kaiju cinema, it’s that Gamera is most consistently a story about a giant monster interacting with humans, in most cases one or more specific humans. When I write for Toho kaiju (and by that I mean Battra), I’ll admit I’m basically just using yet another combination of the 37853590434 creative ways people have come up with to tell a story that’s still really about humans but using the monsters as the characters - and we do this because the monsters do have character. Unlike most giant creatures in the west, Japanese daikaiju represent things, they have emotions and personal values and life purposes, and often unique dynamics in interacting with one another. But you can’t really do much with just this side of things for the Gamera franchise, since there’s not a single monster in any of the full-length films whose relationship with Gamera is anything but antagonistic. But Gamera is already about the relationship between humans and monsters, and that was what I wanted to specifically take these couple of months to explore here, as it’s very similar to the stories I've already been straying farther from canon in order to tell with the friends and enemies of the other Big G.

As far as most of the western kaiju fandom is concerned, having such a focus on humans might appear to be the biggest risk the Gamera movies ever took, given how many fans I often see dismissing the human characters as unimportant at best, annoying at worst. Personally, I beg to differ, and the more I rewatch these films, the more I’ve begun to appreciate how remarkable it is that this one subset of historical foreign cinema, with the characters it portrays and the values it represents, became embedded in western culture all because there happened to be a market for imported special effects films. There are actually quite a lot of kaiju movies whose stories inspire me to want to write about the humans as well as the monsters. But the top of that list, if I wrote it out, would probably be stacked with more Gamera movies than anything else.

Halloweenathon: I Was A Teenage Werewolf

Today on the Halloweenathon we shall look into a classic horror movie that most see as camp but is actually really damn good

This 1957 film follows Tony (Michael Landon ) a teenager with a temper who seeks help from a psychologist Dr. Alfred Brandon(Whit Bissel) who is actually a mad scientist who turns Tony into a werewolf

So this is one of those movies where the title is more famous then the film (Mainly cause the company that made the film,AIP made title first then made the movie to go around it ,as was there custom ) so most people assume it is a cheesy B Movie,while there is definate camp and rediculous plot points (I'll get to you doctor "Somehow thinks turning people into were wolves is a good idea").....This is actually really good

I think the main thing that makes it work is Michael Landon as the lead,as he takes the broody teen angst of Tony seriously,as well as the fact that while he can be a bit of a prick he does want to improve himself ,hes simply a teen desperate for help only to be betrayed by someone he thought was on his side .He is also convincingly ferocious as the werewolf .No wonder he went on to an impressive TV career

Now our villain Dr Brandon ....Is a mixed bag .The actor Whit Bissell is phenomenal doing a perfect protrayal of a seemingly trust worthy guy who has his own sinister agenda and a loose set of morals......The problem is his motivation is kind of dumb and only makes sense if you assume he is completely out of his gourd .Ya know that "I dont wanna cure cancer,I wanna turn people into dinosaurs !" meme....Yeah thats this guy in a nutshell,just replace dinos with werewolves.Again Whit Bissel is good enough to make it work

As for the rest of the film it's pretty damn good ,I like films where people are like "WEll we have a monster,cant dispute that lets deal with it " ,I like that the drama is played straight , ,theres a fun musical number and I am always for random song sequences ,we have a pre "Zorro "Guy Williams and he is pretty good , and I might get some hate for this .....I think there werewolf makeup here is better then the Wolf Man

Overall I really loved this movie

@ariel-seagull-wings @metropolitan-mutant-of-ark @angelixgutz @the-blue-fairie @themousefromfantasyland @amalthea9 @princesssarisa @filmcityworld1

Alien Space Avenger | 1989

"All right already! I'll wear your varsity pin to the homecoming dance! Just go easy on my letterman's jacket!"

I Was A Teenage Werewolf | Episode 346

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I Was A Teenage Werewolf | Episode 346

Jim takes another look at a classic 1957 Monster Movie that set in motion a series of “Teen Exploitation horror films – “I Was A Teenage Werewolf,” starring Michael Landon, Whit Bissell, Yvonne Lime, Barney Phillips, Malcom Atterbury, Joseph Mell and Guy Williams. A mad scientist uses a troubled teen to advance his theory with devastating results. Find out more about this cult classic on this episode of MONSTER ATTACK!, The Podcast Dedicated To Old Monster Movies.

It Conquered the World & The She-Creature (1956)

Channeling his inner Roger Corman and Ed Wood comes Ronnie Ashcroft with THE ASTOUNDING SHE-MONSTER (1958), the film he (likely) wrote, produced and directed! With a badass poster from Albert Kallis, what could go wrong with this horror sci-fi b-movie??

The film stars Robert Clarke, Kenne Duncan, Marilyn Harvey, Jeanne Tatum, Shirley Kilpatrick and Ewing Brown.

Context setting 00:00; Synopsis 17:31; Discussion 27:31; Ranking 46:41

Kaiju Week in Review (January 8-14, 2023)

"Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this." One of my favorite sayings.

There's nothing like a kaiju movie in theaters. Shin Ultraman was almost as fun dubbed as it was subbed (and a smidge easier to follow). I don't know if I'll ever get used to anime voice actors doing live-action kaiju movies, but this was a good group, especially Emily Frongillo as Funaberi and Kellen Goff as Zarab.

Two big pieces of Shin Ultraman news accompanied its U.S./UK theatrical release this week. Cleopatra Entertainment licensed it for an American VOD/home video release; the wording in the press release is a bit confusing, so while the VOD will at least be happening in the spring, I'm not sure about the more important stuff. The Japanese home video releases are due April 12, so don't expect anything before then. Also, Ultraman Connection added the first episode of Shin Ultra Fight, with more to come. The first three episodes are just narrated clips from the movie, but after that, it gets weird. You need a (free) account to view Connection videos.

IDW put out two Godzilla comics this Wednesday—Godzilla Rivals: Rodan vs. Ebirah and Godzilla: Monsters & Protectors - All Hail the King! #4. I don't have much to say about the All Hail the King issue, which is mostly just setting up the big fight in the finale, but Rodan vs. Ebirah was a total delight. Taking the focus off Godzilla and letting some other kaiju shine was the right move, and this is exactly the sort of craziness all of these comics, with their access to nearly the entire Toho sandbox, should be striving for. It also has the distinction of featuring the first nonbinary character in a Godzilla story! At one point they divert a rampaging Biollante with song (all nonbinary people can do this).

After decades of obscurity, Space Monster Wangmagwi is out on Blu-ray from SRS Cinema, and... its obscurity was pretty much warranted. AIP-TV probably could've made something watchable out of this back in the day, but it would have been an order taller than the titular monster. It's largely plotless, with some of the worst foley I've ever heard. The street kid who decides to fight Wangmagwi himself is fun, at least. Given its legendary reputation, I recommend seeing it just to satisfy your curiosity; I'm sure it'll be up on Tubi later this year.

It would be malpractice for me not to mention the reveal of Gigan's older and younger sisters in Godziban. Before you ask, yes, showrunner Hideyuki Kobayashi understands exactly what forces he's playing with. It's very funny watching Toho let him do literally whatever he wants. I'm not sure when they'll be showing up in the show. The announcement was just for their props being exhibited at screenings of the Godziban "movie" (the new episodes from the Blu-ray edited together).

Confused businessman emerges from a screening of the Amazing Colossal Man