Cast:
Susan Cabot (Janice Starlin), Fred Eisley (Bill Lane), Barboura Morris (Mary Dennison), William Roerick (Arthur Cooper), Michael Mark (Dr. Eric Zinthrop), Frank Gerstle (Les Hellman), and Bruno VeSota (Night Watchman)
Produced and Directed by Roger Corman (#368 - The Little Shop of Horrors, #684 - It Conquered the World, #852 - The Terror, #931 - Not of This Earth, #1007 - Attack of the Crab Monsters, #1039 - Five Guns West, #1042 - War of the Satellites, #1136 - Gas-s-s-s, #1147 - X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes, #1186 - A Bucket of Blood, #1423 - The Wild Angels, #1425 - The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, #1674 - Machine-Gun Kelly, #1684 - Creature from the Haunted Sea, #1918 - House of Usher, #2030 - The Trip, #2113 - The Undead, #2211 - The Intruder)
Review:
Oh sure, a movie about a woman trying to deal with her fears of getting older in the eyes of the public by using strange substances. Wait, what year is this? Anyway, this was directed by Roger Corman in his fourth year as a director (which for him was two dozen movies in), complete with being among the first he made for his company The Filmgroup to help with distribution (read: trying to do productions without dealing with certain unions). The story was done by Kinta Zertuche (in her only screenplay, having served an assistant on Beast from Haunted Cave and Attack of the Giant Leeches) while the screenplay was done by Leo Gordon (the occasional writer of films such as The Cry Baby Killer to go along with acting). The movie (which lasts 66 minutes) is in the public domain, although there exists a version that was longer (73 minutes) because Corman asked Jack Hill to direct a few scenes for television a few years after the release of the film - the scene was an introduction to the Zinthrop character being fired for working on wasps instead of what he was assigned to do. In 1995, the movie was remade as a television production directed by Jim Wynorski with oversight from Corman (who saw a handful of his films remade in that era).
It is pretty unfortunate that the movie is not that great, because there sure seems to be a bit of potential to have made something really unnerving in the terror of trying to cope with aging. However, one basically gets The Fly (1958) crossed with The Wolfman but with very little tension zipped into a five-pound bag of corn. The body count is stretched pretty thin to go with little to really draw upon in suspense beyond watching the movie just for the sake of having nothing better to do (the film paired with it in double features was Beast from Haunted Cave, incidentally). This actually was the last movie for its star in Cabot, who appeared in a handful of Westerns and adventure movies (mostly in supporting roles) before doing work for Corman starting in 1957, with whom she appeared in six productions from Carnival Rock (1957) to this. Cabot did some stage work in the later years prior to her murder in 1986. It is a strange way to close a film career, wearing an odd little mask (with little place to breathe if dealing with vapors and a broken bottle) to go with spitting chocolate sauce onto people. But she expressed in later years that it was Corman who gave her "a great amount of freedom", so take that with a grain of salt. The peril presented by our lead is at least one that can be relatable: trying to survive the fear of being passed by in the sands of time. The rest of the cast is serviceable for a mostly quiet staging that doesn't really require too many sets or too much bombast. Even the wasp costume isn't that bad when you get down to it, mostly because with a bit more time or staging, you really could make something out of that unsettling mask in say, a metamorphosis rather than basically going with the "Wolfman" trick. It could've been so much more tragic but instead is just not quite enough to rise above "heh, I guess". As a whole, the general tragedy of chasing for victories of the superficial can only really work with a film committed to really striking somewhere in visual terror too. It is the kind of movie that I can't call good but will at least lend up as not being as bad as it sounds. When faced with little to do on a a weekend, this would be at least somewhat curious to look up.
Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.
