117. Shock and 118. The Alien Factor

Jump to The Alien Factor (1978)

117. Shock (1946)
Director: Alfred L. Werker
Writers: Eugene Ling from a story by Albert DeMond, additional dialoge by Martin Berkeley
From: Cult Cinema; Drive-In
Watch: archive.org

A psychiatrist who’s murdered his wife has the only witness committed to his sanitarium so he can try to convince her she imagined the whole thing.

Janet Stewart checks into a San Francisco hotel to meet her husband, Lt. Stewart, finally returning from the war after two years in a POW camp. She hasn’t had word about him the entire two years and doesn’t even know if he’s injured or not. While waiting for him to arrive, she overhears an argument outside. When she looks, she sees Dr. Cross (Vincent Price) murder his wife. Lt. Stewart arrives the next morning to find her in a state of shock.

The hotel calls in the service of a psychiatrist who happens to be staying there and it’s none other than Dr. Cross! He does a preliminary exam and then, after getting details from the Lt., suspects Janet witnessed the murder. He suggests the Lt. admit her to the sanitarium Dr. Cross runs.

Things inevitably escalate. Cross learns that she did see the murder, he tries to convince her it’s just a delusion, events in the sanitarium convince the other doctors that Cross is right, Janet tries to get out but isn’t believed, and Cross keeps weighing his options while his mistress starts to advocate murder.

Mrs. Cross’ body is found near Cross’ vacation lodge and it’s assumed she fell over a cliff while walking at night. However, the police catch a cat burglar in the area and suspect he may have killed Mrs. Cross. The exhume the body and determine that she was murdered with a candlestick. While they suspect the burglar, Cross decides too much of the truth has come out and decides to kill Janet.

He’s going to put her into a state of shock with shots of adrenaline, and “accidentally” make her overdose on the final one. At the last minute, though, he loses his nerve. His nurse mistress tries to finish the job and Cross murders her instead. It’s at this moment the Lt. and authorities, now suspecting the truth, rush in and find Cross with the nurse’s corpse. Janet and the Lt. are finally reunited and Dr. Cross leaves with the chief detective, presumably to spend the rest of his life in jail.

I mentioned with Green Eyes that I have a real affection for these old black-and-white films, but this one missed the mark a bit for me despite having Vincent Price. The presentation is nice and it feels very film noir, but the movie never commits to one of its two possible storylines.

The set-up’s pretty clear. Either the movie will be about Janet trying to escape an institution where everyone assumes she’s disturbed and she has to endure the doctor’s attacks, or it’s about Dr. Cross getting pulled ever deeper into a situation he never wanted to be a part of. While the movie is primarily the latter—he murders his wife in a moment of pique and has to keep doubling-down on the error—it didn’t feel like it was committing to his moral degradation. Once he hypnotizes Janet, he knows she saw the murder, and has to decide what to do from that point on. His mistress, the nurse, is more overtly evil, occasionally seducing him into deciding to make Janet’s life worse. They start by keeping her sedated, and then he’s hypnotizing her trying to erase the memory, and then straight-up gaslighting her.

That’s all fine, plot-wise, if we’re either watching it from Janet’s point-of-view or seeing Cross wrestle with the decisions to do these things. Since it’s neither, the movie has no clock, no end point it’s being forced to, so there’s rarely any sense of dread. Then it has the blah ending where the good are reunited and the evil punished.

To the good, the movie appears to be in the public domain. There are a few copies already up on archive.org and I’ve added an MPEG2 here. It’s not a terrible movie and it’s put together well enough, it just never grabbed me.


118. The Alien Factor (1978)
Director: Don Dohler
Writer: Don Dohler
From: Sci-Fi Invasion
Watch: YouTube

A spaceship crashes unleashing a trio of horrific monsters upon a small rural town.

From Don Dohler, arguably, the master of low-budget backyard filmmaking, comes a simple flick about monsters killing random people. Dohler’s also known for the very strange, very bad The Galaxy Invader, which I had felt like I’d seen as an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but it never was one (although Rifftrax did do a version). I saw it 8 years ago when I first started the PD Project and, from my comments there, clearly hated it. While that movie is pretty poorly done, The Alien Factor, Dohler’s first, is pretty good.

We open with a couple making out in a car only to be attacked by a monster. The girl gets away, but the boy is killed. The local doctor and sheriff both think the boy was killed by a wild animal since the girl is in shock and can’t tell them differently. The sheriff tells a trio of men not to go looking for the animal and they, of course. . . actually listen to him.

There’s a real sense of people acting reasonably in this film.

The trio does eventually decide to hunt down the animal and bring their friend Susan, but insist on sticking together just so nothing happens to any one of them. Again, reasonable, except what happens happens to all of them: the first alien monster shows up and kills all three men and Susan runs away screaming.

The next day, an invisible alien approaches a man outside his house and ages him to death. The sheriff and doctor don’t know what to do about any of it and the sheriff wants to call in the State Troopers. The mayor objects to that plan as it would bring too much attention to the situation and torpedo his plan to build an amusement park in the area.

The movie also hits every sci-fi/monster movie cliché, and I kind of love it for that.

At this point, the movie pauses to take a breath, watch a local band play “Theme from Filler,” and then another deadmeat gets et.

An astronomer from a nearby observatory, Mr. Zachary, visits the mayor and says he saw a meteor land in the area a few nights before and asks for permission to go looking for it. The mayor joins him on the search leading them to the crashed spaceship and the funniest line in the movie: “Looks like my meteor is a spaceship of some kind.” Everything about it—its cadence, delivery, tone—all of it had me laughing harder than I have in a while.

Zachary finds a dying alien at the crash site who psychically relates the rest of the plot to him before the ship blows up. Zachary goes back to the sheriff, reveals there are three aliens, but that he has secret technology that can kill them. He feels more and more like a Poochie as the movie progresses, killing each alien when no one else can and then being told how awesome he is for doing so. Peak Poochieness comes at the end when it’s revealed that he himself is an alien who has come to save the Earth from the monsters, but now must return to his home planet. Only he gets gut-shot by the sheriff and dies. So I guess he’s 100% Poochie.

The movie has flaws, but it’s fun both in spite of and because of those flaws. The acting’s generally flat, but Zachary is pompous and hilariously bad. Since everyone else is right in the middle, his Shatner-lite antics really stand out. And while, as I noted, it slows down a bit in the middle, it picks back up after that scene. The movie manages an even enough pace throughout and even the technical aspects like sound and camerawork are competent: they’re never so good that they stand out, but never so bad that they’re distracting. In fact, there are several shots that demonstrate Dohler knew how to frame a shot and get the most out of the available light.

And the monster costumes are awesome. Yes, they’re guys in goofy suits, but they’re awesome suits. The final monster is superimposed on the film, a stop-motion creature, I think, whose movements they manage to match to the actor pretty well. The monsters legitimately impressed me.

The seams show, yes, but I found that made the movie more impressive. This was a demonstration of what a bit of passion, skill, and a whole lot of sincere effort can do. The frustration of so many of the other movies I’ve been watching is they had budgets, teams, and talent, but couldn’t give a single damn about making a movie. It’s clear Dohler liked making movies and this one came out nicely.

While this movie is not PD, the owners have made it available to watch freely on YouTube, so please don’t repost or reshare without their permission. Normally I gripe about films not being public domain, but these guys have been working to keep the movie available and to protect their copyright. The actual frustration I have is that Cinematic Titanic did an episode of this, but when I went to link to it, I found that CT had pulled all of their content. I suspect this might be related to the upcoming reboot of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but whether it is or not, I’m always frustrated when access to content is revoked. At least the unriffed version of The Alien Factor is available, and it is so, so riffable. Very fun bad movie that’s not even that bad.

015. The Bat and 016. Death in the Shadows

Jump to Death in the Shadows (1985)

015. The Bat (1959)
Director: Crane Wilbur
Writers: Crane Wilbur from a play by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood
From: Sci-Fi Invasion

A mystery writer starts being menaced by a serial killer known as "The Bat" after renting a house with a million dollars hidden in its walls.

In some ways a by-the-numbers studio suspense piece that, as a commenter on archive.org notes, was done in several versions. This version is pretty strong, though, with nice performances by Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead.

Vincent Price is the town doctor on a hunting trip with the local bank president. The president tells Price that he’s embezzled a million dollars from the bank and hidden it somewhere in his mansion. He expects the vice president of the bank will take the fall, but, to simplify things, wants Price to help the president fake his death. Price instead kills the bank president.

Meanwhile, Agnes Moorehead is a mystery writer who has rented the bank president’s mansion in the countryside for her vacation. The staff is worried because they’ve been hearing tales from town about a serial killer known as “The Bat.” The movie then follows the three plots—the Bat, Price looking for the money, and the effort to exonerate the bank’s vice president—to a satisfying conclusion.

There’s nothing radical about this film, but it handles its twists and misdirections well. I hesitate to say more because I think that would ruin the fun of watching this. The movie doesn’t have any Shyamalan-level twists, but it does a nice job of being aware of and then subverting expectations.

I actually watched this years ago as part of the pd project Horror Collection and had completely forgotten what it was about. I was confusing it with Man in the Attic, a movie about Jack the Ripper starring Jack Palance. The Bat was good, though, even a second time through. Highly recommend for anyone who likes that 50’s aesthetic or if you’re programming a spooky movie marathon for your kid’s slumber party. It has the right tone, doesn’t have any objectionable content, and moves along at a nice pace.

I have no idea why this is on the Sci-Fi Invasion set as opposed to any of the others.

I added an MPEG2 of this movie to the Internet Archive 7 years ago (holy cow. I was just getting ready to move to Philly). You can find it here.


016. Death in the Shadows aka De Prooi (1985)
Director: Vivian Pieters
Writers: Vivian Pieters and Ton Ruys based on Cahterine Arid’s novel Henrietta Who?
From: Pure Terror

Valerie finds out after her mother’s death in a hit-and-run that her mother never had children and wasn’t really her parent. Now Valerie has to sort out the details of her identity before whoever killed her mother kills her as well.

This is a dubbed Dutch film and I worry some of it got lost in translation. The tone’s nice and there are some interesting possibilities presented in how people respond to Valerie trying to uncover her mother’s past, but they don’t relate to the conclusion so the film feels like it takes several unnecessary turns toward the sordid.

And when I say “sordid,” I don’t mean gratuitous nudity, although there is that. Valerie undressing to take a shower or go to bed will make you roll your eyes: it’s not part of the plot, there aren’t other characters there so it’s not about showing a relationship, it’s just obvious pandering.

The sordid elements, though, stem from the neighbor. She’s played up as a suspicious figure and Valerie eventually follows her into town to find out what she does. Turns out the neighbor works as a dancer in a peep show club. All this does is make you ask why it’s there. That’s not a plot point and not something that comes up again. If it were part of the story, if that’s where things were going and Valerie was going to find out some unpleasant truths about her mother’s past, great. The story doesn’t go there, though, so it’s just a moment where the character descends into this leery space just so the movie can indulge in it. Honestly, if you’re going to try to be seedy, commit and tell a seedy story.

The plot itself—basically the revelation at the end and the inciting incident—is solid and compelling on its own. The movie just never feels like it locks into that. I might return to this movie in case I missed something while watching, but I don’t think so.

This is listed in Film Chest’s archives, but that seems unlikely since it’s from 1985 and my copy appears to have a copyright notice in the closing credits (although the print is blurry and it's hard to make out).

PD Project Horror Part 12

This is the final posting of the PD Project Horror Collection so it's only fitting that it start off with something truly horrific:

Ladies and gentlemen, that is the face of the abyss.

Anyway...

Disc 12

The House on Haunted Hill

Vincent Price plays an eccentric millionaire who throws a party for his wife in a haunted house. Each guest is promised $50,000 if they can make it through the night. Only there seem to be schemes at work beyond what even the ghosts have planned.

I just saw this again on The It's Alive Show. Does it have its cheesy moments? Absolutely, but I remember watching this as a kid. I stumbled across it on TV after waking up in the middle of the night and it honestly scared the life out of me. There's a certain time of night, when you're a certain age, where ghost stories seem like the most reasonable things in the world.

William Castle produced and directed this as well as several other classic Vincent Price horror pics. He was doing midnight movies before there was such a thing. When I look at Horror Host shows like Elvira or The It's Alive Show, I'm struck by how much they owe William Castle. It's not that he produced so many movies that they could then build a career on, it's that he made movies that got you excited enough about ghost stories to make them a part of your life.

I uploaded the MPEG to the Internet Archive. It's a nice letterboxed print. If you haven't seen this movie before, it's well worth watching. Especially late at night when there's a storm outside--thunder or snow, doesn't matter. Get the popcorn, get under a blanket and enjoy.

The Last Man on Earth

Vincent Price plays the Last Man on Earth after a virus has killed everyone else and brought them back as vampire-like monsters.

From the excellent Richard Matheson Novel I Am Legend which had a middling remake last year starring Wil Smith and was also the basis of the film The Omega Man starring Charleton Heston. This movie sticks closer to the novel and I find it, frankly, a little dry, a little dull. It's a lot of Price wandering around while we hear his inner dialogue. While it's true to the novel, it's not edge-of-your-seat film making.

There are disagreements on that point though, especially on The It's Alive Show message board. The film's been featured several times on that show and has some ardent admirers. And there is a lot to recommend it. It's very artfully done and what I consider dull or dry can be construed as a portrayal of the monotony of living where there's nothing else in the world.

It's absolutely a movie worth watching and I'd say that goes double for the book. The novel's ending is a knock-out and so far none of the adaptations I've seen of it have gotten it right. Last Man on Earth gets the closest and watching Vincent Price at work is never a disappointment.

Dementia 13

An old Irish family is haunted by dark secrets around the death of a little girl seven years earlier. Two women, one married into the family and one soon to be, start unraveling the secrets at great risk.

Roger Corman producing a film written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Yes, that Francis Ford Coppola, here credited merely as "Francis Coppola." A generally unremarkable slasher pic, it does at least have some good twists. You think the movie will be about manipulating the mother to change the will and then it becomes about something else entirely. Could have been better, but not bad for a first pic and not bad by Corman standards either.

Phantom From 10,000 Leagues

An undersea radiation experiment produces a monstrous creature, but instead of trying to destroy the creature, people are fighting over keeping it a secret.

Oh, and we end with a non-free film! What bad luck. While the film appears to be PD, the score is not and thus I cannot add it to the Internet Archive. Alas and alack.

And further gnashing of teeth, this one blows--hard. Standard 50's atomic sci-fi featuing a dumpy white hero who does nothing to save the day or affect the plot. Teeth-achingly dull. The monster at least looks neat, but not neat enough to counterbalance the absence of anything else to see in this film.

And that's it. The Horror 50-Pack is tapped out, completely watched and as fully uploaded as can be. There will be a breif hiatus from the PD Project as I gather information on the films in the Chilling Classics 50-Movie Pack and move from one American metropolis to another. In addition to starting a new pack, the format of the project will change as well. Instead of one disc of films being reviewed every Wednesday and Saturday, I'll only post a two-film, double-feature-style review every Saturday at midnight following The It's Alive Show (which broadcasts online. So enjoy that and then surf over here for more movie much to stream online). It'll take a little longer (25 weeks for the whole thing), but it'll be more consistent and give me a chance to work on other projects. So stick around, the dreck will be back soon. As long as Hollywood keeps squeezing 'em out, I'll be around to say it smells.

PD Project Horror Part 11

Guess what...

see more dog pictures

I'm so excited, I threw a party but...

see more dog pictures

So I decided to stop posting LOL pictures on this blog.

Disc 11

The Amazing Mr. X

A widow preparing to remarry consults a psychic after she starts being haunted by the ghost of her husband. Only not everything is as it seems.

A beautifully-shot piece of duplicity and double-crosses. The twists are so satisfying that I don't want to say anything more lest I spoil the surprise. This might be my favorite movie from the set.

Bloodlust

A group of teenagers land on the shores of an island owned by a hunter who likes to play the most dangerous game.

There are only two things worth noting about this film. 1: it stars the father from the Brady Bunch who was apparently being groomed to be a teen steam star. 2: there's a MSTie version and you're better off watching that.

This was featured as episode 0607 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and can be purchased as part of the Mystery Science Theater Collection Volume 1.

The Bat

A mystery writer starts being menaced by a serial killer known as "The Bat" after renting a house with a million dollars hidden in its walls.

Vincent Price as a conniving doctor in a murder mystery. It's not bad. Not horror in any way, shape or form, but it's not bad. The revelation of the killer is a bit of a let down if you know the logic of murder mysteries and their inevitable twists. Still, a pretty good movie and an incredible print. I'm used to the films on this 50-movie mega pack being bad video rips of scratchy prints. This looks sharp, nearly pristine and it's the version I've added to the Internet Archive.

Last Woman on Earth

Something temporarily sucks all the oxygen out of the air killing everyone on earth except Mr. and Mrs. Gent and their lawyer Martin who happen to be SCUBA diving at the time. Tensions rise as Mr. Gent and Martin start fighting over Mrs. Gent, the Last Woman on Earth.

Roger Corman. Hooray! But this isn't one of his best. You'd think the movie would be about the woman coming into her own. After all, she's in demand and controls the supply, you'd think she'd own the situation. Instead it's just an hour of the older Mr. Gent and the younger Martin chaffing over the points where their worldviews don't gell. Pretty disappointing.

Next week, everything ends. Disc 12: Vincent Price x2, Roger Corman and a radioactive monster. The perfect end to a perfect project so I might as well use it for this project.