Apocalypse Later Books by Hal C F Astell Cinematic Hell Huh? An A-Z of Why Classic American Bad Movies Were Made Filmography Series Velvet Glove Cast in Iron: The Films of Tura Satana Festival Series The International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival 2012 Apocalypse Later Cinematic Hell Huh? An A-Z of Why Classic American Bad Movies Were Made Apocalypse Later Press Phoenix, AZ Apocalypse Later Cinematic Hell Series Huh? An A-Z of Why Classic American Bad Movies Were Made ISBN-10: 0989461300 ISBN-13: 978-0-9894613-0-6 Apocalypse Later Press catalogue number: ALP001 Reviews by Hal C F Astell These reviews originally appeared, albeit in evolutionary form, at Apocalypse Later http://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com They evolved out of a series of reviews I wrote for Cinema Head Cheese http://cinemaheadcheese.blogspot.com Front cover art by Eric Schock http://www.evilrobo.com All posters and videocassette covers reproduced here are believed to be owned by the studios, producers or distributors of their associated films, or the graphic artists or photographers who originally created them. They are used here in reduced, black and white form in accordance with fair use or dealing laws. Published through CreateSpace https://www.createspace.com Typeset in Gentium http://scripts.sil.org/FontDownloadsGentium Licensed through Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Dedication This book is dedicated to three ladies and three gentlemen, all of whom had a hand in its evolution, however inadvertently. Pam Astell, you’ve put up with me longer than anyone else and, in doing so, taught me to read, to write and to think. Tracy Barnett, you showed me films that I had no excuse for not having seen before and, in doing so, started me on the road to what would become Apocalypse Later and, now, this book. Dee Astell, if there was anything worse than suffering through each of these pictures (and more besides) with me, sometimes more than once, it was surely suffering through me figuring out what to do with this project as well. That heartfelt dedication of yours deserves a heartfelt dedication of mine. This first book has been a long time in the making and it isn’t the title with which I expected to start out, but it really doesn’t matter which it turned out to be; it’s book number one and it was always going to be for the three of you. And because it turned out to be this one, it’s also dedicated to the folk at Cinema Head Cheese. David C Hayes, Jeff Dolniak and Kevin Moyers, you graciously allowed me to pollute your site with reviews of many of the worst movies ever made and never once complained that they didn’t star yourselves. Maybe in the sequels... Acknowledgements No book is ever created by one person, regardless of whose name is on the cover. Many other people deserve credit, along with my undying gratitude and appreciation for their part in bringing this one to print. Thank you, one and all! Most obviously, thanks to Dee Astell, my long suffering better half. She watched everything reviewed here with me, sometimes more than once. Reread the contents page and shiver at that thought! Think about all the other films that didn’t make into the eventual A-Z! And it gets worse; after managing to put them out of her mind, I then forced her through them once again by reading my reviews aloud to her. That helped me to find odd errors and her to point out where I got the wrong end of the stick. She even got to endure this particular project in a growing number of incarnations until I finally figured out how to do it right. You are a saint. I write in OpenOffice because I like free software (free as in both beer and speech), so naturally I laid out this book in OpenOffice too. I found that I didn’t know as much as I thought I did on that front, so thanks to Alexandra Rowland, who doesn’t know me from Adam but who wrote a thoroughly informative blog entry on the subject that you should read too if you find yourself in the same situation. She taught me a lot and saved me a lot of time. That blog entry is: http://alexandrarowland.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/ formatting-pod-novels-with-openoffice-in-linux/ Thanks to Bob Nelson, emperor extraordinary of the Brick Cave Publishing empire who talked me through every other technical aspect of expanding Apocalypse Later from blog to print. Thanks to Eric Schock of Evil Robo Productions for his awesome cover, especially on such short notice. Finally, special thanks to the titans of terror, the sultans of sleaze, the unholy trinity of Admiral Jeff Dolniakbar, demonic teddy bear David C (for Cuddly) Hayes and Kevin Moyers (who honestly doesn’t hate everything), for allowing, even encouraging, my scribbles to help build Cinema Head Cheese. It’s good to know that far below your gleaming spires lies a dank dungeon with my name scrawled on its wall in blood. Contents Introduction 11 A is for Ambition Eegah (1965) 14 B is for Bruce Fist of Fear, Touch of Death (1980) 20 C is for Con The Creeping Terror (1964) 28 D is for Debt The Corpse Grinders (1971) 34 E is for Ego Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) 42 F is for Frustration The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961) 50 G is for Gimmickry Strange Interlude (1932) 58 H is for Hubris Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) 66 I is for Insanity Pink Angels (1971) 72 J is for Justice Child Bride (1938) 80 K is for Knockers Double Agent 73 (1974) 88 L is for Location Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961) 96 M is for Mimicry Life Returns (1935) 104 N is for Necessity Monster a Go-Go (1965) 112 O is for Opportunity Polk County Pot Plane (1977) 120 P is for Patchwork Devil Monster (1946) 128 Q is for Quickie Cuban Rebel Girls (1959) 136 R is for Religion Blood Freak (1972) 144 S is for Sex The Outlaw (1943) 152 T is for Timeslot They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1976) 160 U is for Unknown The Monster of Camp Sunshine (1964) 168 V is for Violence Blood Feast (1963) 176 W is forWhimsy Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1966) 184 X is for eXploitation Chained for Life (1951) 192 Y is for Yes The Conqueror (1956) 200 Z is for Zeal Reefer Madness (1936) 208 Bibliography 215 About Hal C F Astell 216 About Apocalypse Later 217 Huh? An A-Z of Why Classic American Bad Movies Were Made Introduction Like many of the films reviewed in this book, Huh? encountered a fundamental reevaluation partway through. It wasn’t as emphatic as the reevaluation Ray Dennis Steckler gave Rat Pfink a Boo Boo at the halfway mark, but it was important nonetheless. Originally this was an online review project that aimed at tearing apart the sort of classic bad movies which are frequently ranked amongst the worst of all time. I was doing my part to build a website called Cinema Head Cheese by contributing a new review every week throughout 2010 for a series I called Cinematic Hell, as an obvious balance to the Cinematic Heaven project I was also working through at the time, for which I aimed to watch and review every movie in the IMDb Top 250 list. Cinematic Hell and its choice of material seemed appropriate for the venue. I set few boundaries outside the inherent lack of quality these films have, covering a wide variety of films across multiple decades and from multiple countries. I hadn’t planned out the list of films entirely to begin with, but I knew that I wanted the end product to be a representative guide to bad pictures. For instance, while American cinema has given us many awful movies, I knew that I had to include The Crippled Masters, which is a Taiwanese martial arts movie starring a man with no arms and a man with no legs; the surreal Mexican Christmas story, Santa Claus, and the German exploitation flick called The Horrors of Spider Island, which, for some reason that still escapes me, remains the most visited review of all time at Apocalypse Later by a factor of two. I also knew that I wanted to span the decades. I had to include the 1934 Dwain Esper picture, Maniac, because it was so far ahead of its time as a movie that’s “so bad, it’s good”. I also had to include the Brucesploitation movie, Fist of Fear, Touch of Death, because it’s a definitively awful work containing so much that’s fundamentally wrong that I could easily ride through a long review. These two became my bookends in time at Cinema Head Cheese; I conjured everything else up from the years in between. That effective cut-off date of 1980 to ensure a focus on classic material was spawned from another idea: for me to stop after fifty 11 Huh? An A-Z of Why Classic American Bad Movies Were Made reviews and then follow up in 2011 with a similar project that covered the modern equivalent to these classic awful pictures. Maybe that will still happen one day, but I cringe at the thought of having to watch films like From Justin to Kelly, Gigli or Norbit.