The Snow Creature.

Review #2319: The Snow Creature.

Cast: 

Paul Langton (Frank Parrish), Leslie Denison (Peter Wells), Teru Shimada (Subra), William Phipps (Lt. Dunbar), Lock Martin (the Yeti), Rollin Moriyama (Leva), Robert Kino (Inspector Karma), George Douglas (Corey Jr), and Rudolf Anders (Dr. Louis DuPont), Produced and Directed by W. Lee Wilder (#1599 - Killers from Space)

Review:

Sure, it made sense to try and give another shot to W. Lee Wilder, who couldn't have just been a hack director that so generously gave us Killers From Space, the movie with googly-eyed monsters that came out in the same year as this movie. Yes, after six relatively normal-sounding noirs and dramas, he had turned to sci-fi stuff with Phantom from Space (1953). So anyway, here we are with a creature feature movie that might as well be called "Shadows and Blah Blah". You might wonder how many movies exist where you don't really see the monster too much, and, well, there are a few that don't dwell too much on effects and go with the idea of "imagination in terror" or something to that extent. But this film, as written by Myles Wilder (no points to the guess of his relation to W. Lee) has only one apparent sticking point: it was apparently among the first in a string of "yeti" (okay, it's just bigfoot but cold) movies that would come across in the next few years (well there is a film called Pekka ja Pätkä lumimiehen jäljillä [1954] that was released in Finland as a Yeti-themed comedy but I'm sure Ishiro Honda's Half Human [1955] just came out of the blue). Clearly it led to inspirational movies such as Man Beast (1956), as made by Jerry Warren. Actually, Wilder wasn't done with the noirs, as his next film was The Big Bluff (1955) in a career that saw him do more movies that I'm sure will be fun candidates to return to in late November.

Sure, 69 minutes might seem short enough for a straight-to-the-point movie. But the easiest thing to say about the movie is that nothing actually happens in this miserable pile of boredom. It actually resorts to narration to help try and set up its scenario and manages to never get going, particularly since you barely see the creature in actual detail while going around with a pastiche of movies that it happens to make one yearn to watch with the "getting the creature from abroad onto America" in King Kong (1933) or the sewer-side climax from Them! (1954). But nothing will prepare you for the sheer amount of nothing that happens, even with a miniscule body-count and characters that seem to believe that they are the living embodiment of cardboard and should therefore talk as routinely as possible (gotta love how the unnamed Himalayan country has Japanese-speaking actors, who are probably more committed to worrying about the boogeyman creature than the others). People walk, talk in winded sentences (the idea of wondering where it should be in immigration services is thought about and forgotten) and so on and so on. Maybe Phipps is the highlight of a bad bunch, because he doesn't have to go around doing monologues (our hero at one point refers to the sherpas as being like "human mules"!), but it can't make up to a movie that because of its public domain status is usually found in languishing quality. The only thing to say about the creature is that it was played by Martin, a 7ft tall man who had appeared in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), who probably was as cramped in that "suit" as one is when watching the movie. The movie ends with silly jokes about someone becoming a dad because they were too wrapped up in the hunt to see their wife give birth...funny stuff. As a whole, the purses made by Wilder probably seem more tantalizing than seeing another one of his dull movies.

Overall, I give it 2 out of 10 stars.

Next up: Saturday, Saturday, Saturday! Viva Knievel!

Killers from Space.

Review #1599: Killers from Space.

Cast:

Peter Graves (Dr. Douglas Martin), Frank Gerstle (Dr. Curt Kruger), James Seay (Col. Banks), Steve Pendleton (FBI Agent Briggs), Barbara Bestar (Ellen Martin), Shepard Menken (Major Clift, M.D.), John Frederick (Denab and The Tala), Jack Daly (Powerhouse Supervisor), and Ron Kennedy (Sentry Sergeant) Directed and Produced by W. Lee Wilder.

Review:

If anyone has to do a turkey from the 1950s, you better believe it is going to be one that either has something to do with space or was made on the cheap. How about a film with both qualities? W. Wilder, the (slightly) older brother of Billy Wilder, served as director alongside producer through his company Planet Filmplays. Believe it or not, this was actually his second career, since he was a handbag manufacturer with his own line before deciding to take up filmmaking after he had turned 40, starting with producing for The Great Flamarion (1945) before making his first of ultimately sixteen films with The Glass Alibi (1946). His son Myles co-wrote the film with William Raynor; Myles would write six screenplays for his father, and four of them fell into the genre of either science fiction or horror that W. Wilder utilized for half of his output in the 1950s (quickly made films for release with United Artists or RKO, which he did five of). One working title evidently was The Man Who Saved the Earth, which is more or less just as generic as the actual film title.

As a whole, what we have is a middling movie of mediocrity, and you can see it all for yourself for free as it is in the public domain, with one version even having green tinting (?). Graves (the only person to have starred in films for both Wilder brothers) is fairly wooden, but the film is giving him the minimal stuff to begin with, confronting the truth of what happened to go with his colleagues bringing in the FBI and such. Probably nobody could make being spooked by rear-projected insects seem really something big, I suppose. While Graves did eventually find some level of fame with the espionage show Mission: Impossible a decade later, he isn't exactly bringing the tight compact thrills the script (sort of) wants to bring to deliver enjoyment. On the other hand, at least it makes it easier to appreciate his subsequent work with a weird-looking monster in It Conquered the World (1956). Gerstle and the crew of skeptics move just as well in pedestrian contribution to the wood community of acting, and the voices for the aliens...well, let's just say they make an interesting contrast to their visual effect. The aliens come through at the 34 minute mark, and suffice to say they are not a particularly great effect. Makeup artist Harry Thomas described the effect at coming from the top of plastic egg trays (with the help of a screwdriver to get them off and pierce the center for eyeholes). Of course he also wanted them to have flesh color edge of the eyes with beards and "vacuum" speaking, and if the production wasn't so cheap they wouldn't have balked at having glass eyes. The other amusement comes from their big threat: Once there is enough radiation from a nuclear test (because they run on energy), they will take over the planet with their giant monsters (which just happen to look like enlarged footage of insects and animals). This of course is revealed through truth serum, after a plan to leave the plans to the atomic bomb test under a rock (!) failed...Anyway, the rest of the film doesn't show the googly-eye boys up close (unless one counts a head shot), since they already showed us the master plan (I guess all the other planets they conquered didn't get the memo). Can you count a run-time of 71 minutes if at least two minutes are just Graves looking at footage of spiders, grasshoppers, and lizards? But effects aren't everything, one will say. If the film that came from such...interesting effects was any better, you may have a hidden gem in your hands. Unfortunately, what we have is a bland film that only seems notable because of eyeballs and an alien abduction story that others have noted to seem like the predecessor to "alien abduction" stories. Just because your story seems familiar to those conspiracy theory-I mean "true" stories about being taken away by aliens with big eyes on a table with weird procedure stuff doesn't mean you get extra credit (for fun, I will throw out a concept of a shadowy group...shall we say, The Company, that wants to make street signs less easy to read for the insurance money and come back to it in 30 years to see if anyone believes it). As a whole, it's a bit too quiet in the department of actual thrill or even interesting concepts with its title characters to be worth much more than just to view the big plastic egg tray aliens try to go to town with giant insects. But hey, as a 1950s turkey, it feels right at home for those looking for that particular requirement.

Next Time: A Place for Lovers.

Overall, I give it 4 out of 10 stars.