FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND (1981)

Any movie that starts out with a hot-air balloon crash is just asking for trouble.

FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND was supposedly made in 1981, looks like it was made in 1972, and feels like it was made in 1957. It's all kinds of messed up. If it wasn't so stoopidly fun, I'd say it was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I mean, it's bad. There's nothing really good about it. But none of it is boring, and being boring is the biggest sin a movie can commit. Every five minutes, it's like it's a whole other movie. You never know what's gonna hit you.

Anyway, four idiots and a dog crash into the ocean in their beautiful balloon, and life-raft their way to lovely Frankenstein Island. There's a bunch of annoying old guys (one of them is Robert Clarke, who's been in TONS better movies than this!) and an annoying Peter Brady-looking tool named Dino. Seriously. And a dog named Melvin. Seriously. You know what you're in for when one of the guys leans onto their life raft -- which there's nothing wrong with -- and says that they need to gather wood to build a raft. SERIOUSLY.

So they wander into a cliffside cave for no good reason, there's a split-second shot of the Floating Head of John Carradine, and they wind up on the main part of the island, which is lucky for them. They could have gotten killed in that cave, and nobody would ever have found them.

Then they find Amazons. Yep, there's a tribe of jungle ladies living on Frankenstein Island, and they all use human skulls as bongs, wear leopard-print bikinis, and are suspiciously white. (Really, you know? Every movie I see where there's a tribe of Amazon jungle babes, they're all white girls. I don't know if there's any science backing this up, but something tells me that isn't accurate.) And the four idiots discover that if you try to say the name of any place that ISN'T Frankenstein Island, something that's "like telepathy" makes your arm hurt really bad. SERIOUSLY. Then there's night-time snake dancing and another appearance by the Floating Head of John Carradine who spouts off about "The Power!!!!" I think they shot all of his appearances in a half hour.

So then there's some zombie dressed up kinda like the Hamburglar that nabs one of the jungle girls, and some grizzled old guys from a pirate movie show up and laugh a lot and say that they should all be friends, and then invite the team of idiots up to "where the valleys rise to the sun." They get there and wait around at a camp outside the main house on the island, and there's a bunch more zombie guys, and then Cameron Mitchell is in a jail cell and believes he's in an Edgar Allan Poe movie, and the whole shooting match is being run by Sheila Van Helsing who's the great-granddaughter of Dr. Frankenstein, and the zombie guys wave around plastic Halloween pitchforks and turn an 8x10" glossy headshot of John Carradine into an 8x10" headshot of a SKULL, and there's a zombie fight where we cut to reaction shots FROM THE ZOMBIES (who don't have emotions), and there's a weird electronic thing that gives Sheila Frankenstein the albino white zombie eyes that the zombies have, but only for a second and it's never referred to again, and the Floating Head of John Carradine who is playing the Ghost of Dr. Frankenstein pops up and says "The Power! The Golden Thread!" a lot, and Sheila's husband is a MILLION YEARS OLD and is in bed and doesn't amount to much, and Cameron Mitchell is the dad of one of the jungle girls, and then the Frankenstein Monster shows up and waves his arms around and everyone escapes, and it was all just a dream OR WAS IT?

See? You get ALL THIS for less than the price of most other movies. Nothing in the movie is related to anything else that happens in the movie, and nothing makes any sense, but I COULDN'T STOP WATCHING. Sometimes just knowing that a movie like this exists makes you glad to be alive.

Invaders From Mars (1953)

Watched this back-to-back with Invasion of the Saucer-Men for a night of invading saucer-men. This one is totally serious, and pretty creepy. A kid named David sees a saucer sink into a sand pit behind his house, and everyone who goes to check on it comes back...different. They get sucked into the sand pit and have brain-control devices implanted in their heads! Holy crap. So he's got the problem of everyone who believes him getting controlled by the Martians, plus having to convince people who *don't* believe him in the first place. Wikipedia says that this film is unique in telling the story from the point of view of a kid in an adult world heading into crisis. Man, I can identify with *that*. The film is amazing-looking. It totally takes advantage of whatever budget it had, and it turns out really bizarre and otherworldly. Even the "regular" scenes on everyday Earth are weird. Which makes sense when you find out the final twist, which I'm not going to spoil. You need to see this. Dad tells me to avoid the remake from '86. I don't see how they could make this any better, even with better effects, so I might just follow his lead on that one.

Invasion of the Saucer-Men (1957)

Wow. Picked this up at a local comics convention that Dad and Cady took me and Jack to. I'd seen the little alien guys in this in pictures and posters and stuff, but had never seen the movie itself. This thing is nuts! These little aliens are invading and kill people by injecting alcohol into their bodies with these needles in their fingers. It winds up you can defeat the aliens by shining bright lights on 'em. There's a disembodied alien hand with an eye wandering around for good measure, too. It's obviously not taking itself very seriously, which is good, because there's no reason for it to. It has one of those great 1950s "The End...Or Is It???" endings. SO much fun. Me and dad laughed like idiots the whole time.