Drum (1976)

Drum was a kind of sequel to Mandingo, which in 1975 had (for a short time) put the slavesploitation genre on the map. Mandingo actually took itself more seriously than you might expect, trying to be more than just trash. It was trash, but trash with some pretensions. Drum appeared in the following year and it is pure trash. Pure trash, but deliriously entertaining trash.

Drum is the name of a slave. We start with a brief prologue about his birth and upbringing. He is the offspring of a white woman, Marianna (Isela Vega) and a black slave. Marianna’s slave Rachel raised the boy as her own to avoid a scandal.

Now, twenty years later, Marianna runs the most celebrated whorehouse in New Orleans. Drum enjoys a comfortable enough life as a house slave. Then fate takes a hand.

The sinister degenerate Bernard DeMarigny (John Colicos) has organised a fight between two slaves to serve as entertainment for his friends but one of the slaves has been withdrawn from the fight by his master. Rather than be embarrassed in front of his friends DeMarigny coerces Marianna into allowing Drum to fight. DeMarigny’s slave Blaise (Yaphet Kotto) is a formidable opponent. After half-killing Blaise Drum decides he wants to be his friend. It will be an uneasy friendship.

DeMarigny offers Drum anything he wants as a reward for winning the fight and Drum decides he wants a woman. He gets Calinda (Brenda Sykes). As a bonus he also gets Blaise. Things turn very awkward however when DeMarigny tries to seduce Drum and not only gets rejected but gets clobbered as well. DeMarigny vows to get his revenge.

To get Drum out of the situation Marianna sells him to Hammond Maxwell (Warren Beatty). Maxwell’s plantation, Falconhurst, is devoted entirely to the breeding of slaves.

To set up a nicely explosive situation two more elements are added. Maxwell wants Marianna to find him a nice whore to help him raise his very troublesome daughter Sophie (Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith) but Augusta (Fiona Lewis) turns out to be a lady rather than a whore and being a lady she is determined to change things at Falconhurst.

Even more explosive is Sophie herself, whose chief hobby seems to be trying to seduce the male slaves. When set sets her sights on Blaise things are clearly going to get messy. If the master finds out he’ll have Blaise killed, if Blaise is lucky.

The stage is set for the standard slavesploitation ending - a revolt with lots and lots of violence.

The plot offers obvious opportunities for copious amounts of sex and violence. The sex includes every deviation you can think of. There’s a great deal of nudity. Most of it is entirely gratuitous but it doesn’t pretend to be anything else, which at least is refreshingly honest.

This was not an exploitation B-movie. It was a genuine big-budget A-picture. It was originally a Paramount project but ended up being released by United Artists. The switch to UA entailed major reshuffles with Steve Carver replacing Burt Kennedy as director, major cast changes and a complete rewrite of the script. It also meant a cut in the budget but the budget was still insanely high by exploitation movie standards. Not many exploitation movies have a crew of 150. And when they needed a mansion they built one, at a cost of one million dollars (and that’s one million dollars in 1976 money). They then burnt it to the ground.

With lots of money spent on it and an extremely generous 63-day shooting schedule you’d expect Drum to look sensational, and it does. The sets are superb. And they’re big! Having multiple Academy Award-winning cinematographer Lucien Ballard onboard also doesn’t hurt.

The movie’s biggest asset is Warren Oates. He gives a performance that very cleverly combines campiness and subtlety. He gets plenty of laughs but he makes Hammond Maxwell surprisingly complex. Maxwell might be a slave-owner but in his own bizarre way he’s a kindly man with his own individual but rigid moral code. He is definitely no melodrama villain. He’s the most interesting and in some ways the most sympathetic character in the movie.

Ken Norton can’t act at all but he looks the part. Yaphet Kotto can act, and does so to good effect. Fiona Lewis is a delight as Augusta, combining primness with spirit and managing to be scheming but in a good way. Pam Grier gets very little to do as Maxwell’s bed wench Regine (unfortunately most of her scenes were among the many that the MPAA insisted be cut). Rainbeaux Smith is great fun as the terrifyingly slutty Sophie.

While it tries to be a bit more serious at the beginning and at the end the middle part of Drum is outrageous and often very funny.

Drum is the kind of movie that no-one would dare to make today. While it ticks all the right political boxes and takes all the correct political stances (it is certainly very much an anti-slavery film) it still manages to be outrageously politically incorrect. There’s nothing pious or preachy here - despite the big budget this is unequivocally an exploitation movie and it delivers the exploitation elements with enthusiasm. Steve Carver was a graduate of the Roger Corman school of film-making and the end result is exactly like a Roger Corman movie made on an enormous budget.

One thing you have to keep in mind is that if this film seems a little disjointed at times that’s because it was cut to ribbons by the MPAA.

Kino Lorber’s Region 1 DVD includes an audio commentary by the director. The transfer is anamorphic and it’s excellent.

Drum is totally disreputable but it doesn’t care. It sets out to entertain and it succeeds. Highly recommended.

The Wild Women of Wongo (1958)

It has to be admitted that The Wild Women of Wongo, released in 1958, is a pretty terrible movie. It’s the sort of Z-grade cinematic shlock that will either bore you to tears or delight you depending on taste.

The opening voiceover is provided by Mother Nature herself. She explains that while overall she thinks she’s done a pretty good job she has made one or two mistakes and she proceeds to tell us about one of her bigger errors of judgment. Ten thousand years ago she tried an experiment with two tribes, the Wongo and the Goona. She made all the Wongo women gorgeous and the men ugly and dorky, while she made all the Goona men handsome studs and all the Goona women rather less than beautiful. In fact much less than beautiful.

At first things went OK since the two villages were unaware of each other’s existence, until one fateful day Engor, the son of the Goona king, arrived with a warning about a marauding tribe of ape-men. The women of Wongo are stunned when they see Engor. They have never seen such a hunky guy. They get really excited when he tells them that in Goona he’s nothing special - all the guys are equally good-looking. Omoo (Jean Harkshaw), the daughter of the Wongo king, is determined to have Engor as her husband. The men of Wongo might be ugly brutes but they’re not stupid. They figure out that they’re going to have a real problem with their women so they decide to kill Engor.

Omoo and the other Wongo gals foil this dastardly plan and for this they are punished by being offered as sacrifices to the dragon god.

Meanwhile Engor returns to Goona and now the studly men of Goona know that Wongo is full of hot babes. As you can imagine they’re extremely excited by this piece of news.

There’s really not enough plot for the film’s 71-minute running time. That’s the main weakness here. Trimmed to an hour or so it would have been much more fun. The plot also tends to wander at times. The ape-men seem like they’re going to be a major threat but then they just sort of get forgotten.

The acting is generally atrocious. In my view that’s a plus. Good acting would have sunk a movie like this. There’s some horrendous dialogue and it sounds better when it’s delivered with such spectacular ineptitude.

Whatever its other deficiencies The Wild Women of Wongo does have some nice visual elements. The various locations (all in Florida) look quite good. There’s a reasonably impressive underwater sequence. What makes that sequence really fun is that it includes a fight to the death between Omoo and an alligator. He’s not exactly the most fearsome of alligators and he’s no match for a strong healthy girl.

Naturally given all the sexual tensions there’s going to be a cat-fight scene. It’s between Omoo and her deadly rival Ahtee and it’s rather amusing. There’s also some very weird dancing by the Wongo women. They might be beautiful but their dancing skills are somewhat questionable.

There’s one moment that is quite gruesome by 1958 standards, a guy getting chomped by a gator, or at least it would be gruesome had it not been so ludicrously (and delightfully) fake.

There are plenty of very attractive women in skimpy costumes but there’s no nudity, which gives it a kind of innocent charm. There’s ample eye candy for the ladies as well, provided by the hot guys of Goona.

The ending is not totally unexpected and it’s probably the only way the film could have ended. This is after all a light-hearted fun movie.

This movie has had several DVD releases, most notably in a jungle triple-feature from Something Weird (the other movies on that DVD being Bowanga Bowanga and Virgin Sacrifice) and as a double-feature from VCI paired with Jungle Girl and the Slaver as Volume 4 in their Psychotronica series. I’m told the VCI release offers the better transfer but not having seen it I can’t confirm that. The Something Weird version isn’t too bad. Image quality is generally OK but the colours are definitely faded.

The Wild Women of Wongo won’t please everybody and perhaps you have to be in the right mood to appreciate it. I happened to be in just the right mood. I found it to be both engagingly goofy and funny and and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I can certainly recommend it for fans of jungle movies and prehistoric women movies.

The Beast and the Vixens (1974)

The Beast and the Vixens (AKA The Beauties and the Beast AKA Desperately Seeking Yeti) is a movie of quite staggering awfulness, and yet it has a certain morbid fascination. It is almost impossible to imagine what this movie was intended to be. It’s not scary enough to be horror. It might have been intended as parody although I do have a feeling that most of the humour is unintentional. There are some fairly explicit sex scenes but not enough of them to make this a softcore porn movie. There’s a high camp quotient but since this was 1974 it’s difficult to know how deliberate that might have been.

It’s amazingly badly made. We’re talking Ed Wood levels of incompetence here. The script is frighteningly incoherent. Even the average out-and-out softcore skin flick has a tighter plot than this film.

What makes it worth watching is that you have absolutely no idea what’s coming next. There are three or four sub-plots that have no connection whatsoever with each other, and in some cases the sub-plots just sort of suddenly stop.

The movie takes place in the Pacific Northwest. Bigfoot Country. And Bigfoot plays a major part in this movie. Bigfoot has been collecting girls. He snatches them and takes them to his cave. When he gets them to his cave, he....well, he feeds them and looks after them.

While this is going on city girls Ann (Jean Gibson) and Mary (Uschi Digard) have taken a remote mountain cabin to get away from it all. Mary is a bit frightened by being in the country so Ann gives her a cuddle to comfort her. Since they’re in bed together and they’re naked this is naturally going to lead to some hot girl-on-girl action, except that it doesn’t. Maybe Ann was just trying to comfort her? Maybe the sex scene got cut, but there are quite explicit sex scenes later in the picture.

Ann and Mary meet up with a bunch of dirty stinking hippies who seem to be living some kind of communal lifestyle in the woods. Ann and Mary immediately take their clothes off and go skinny-dipping with a particularly loathsome male hippie. It is an excuse for Uschi Digard to get naked.

Whole all this is going on there’s a couple of hardened criminal types who are trying to find the loot from a robbery. The loot consists of a valuable coin collection but it’s disappeared from the place where they stashed it. One of these hoods has however noticed a hippie chick wearing a coin around her neck, a coin that looks like part of the collection they’re looking for.

There’s also a strange old hermit guy but I have no idea what he has to do with anything.

This movie does have one major thing going for it - the nude western gunfight scene. It makes no sense whatsoever but it’s the one truly inspired moment in the movie.

The acting is astoundingly horrible. The fact that many of the major characters are hippies and therefore inherently detestable doesn’t help. Uschi Digard’s voice was dubbed in many of her films but this seems to be her own voice. Her very thick Swedish accent is kind of charming. Her acting is terrible, but in an amusingly bad way. Look out for Sharon Kelly in a small role, fully clothed!

One of the hippies gets to sing a song. It’s the sort of song that makes you hope that all the hippies in the movie will die horribly.

The Bigfoot makeup is simply dire. 

Bayview Entertainment’s DVD offers two different versions of the film. There’s a widescreen transfer of what is claimed to be the R-rated theatrical release, which clocks in at 71 minutes. It’s an OK transfer but there is quite a lot of print damage. There’s also a fullframe transfer of the unrated version, clocking in at 84 minutes. This transfer is fairly poor. On the other hand there are some extras. There’s a (brief) audio commentary by Fred Olen Ray. He makes the interesting suggestion that this was a kind of composite movie, that the original movie did not feature Bigfoot at all and that the Bigfoot scenes were filmed later and combined with the original footage to make a totally different movie. That would certainly explain at least some of the movie’s plot incoherence and some of the  jumping about between completely unrelated elements. And speaking of extras, there’s a complete bonus movie, Hollywood Babylon, with Uschi Digard as Marlene Dietrich! It’s a softcore expose of Hollywood depravity during the silent era. So all in all the DVD isn’t bad value.

If Ed Wood had made a Bigfoot movie with softcore sex scenes it would have been very much like The Beast and the Vixens. It’s a terrible movie but you have to keep watching. Recommended, for its oddity, its camp value, its unpredictability and because there just aren’t enough nude western gunfight scenes in movies.

The Navy vs. the Night Monsters (1966)

The Navy vs. the Night Monsters  is a slice of classic 1960s drive-in movie cheesiness.

As so often in sci-fi/horror movies of that era the threat to humanity originates in the frozen wastes of either the Arctic or Antarctica. In this case it’s Antarctica. Plant samples from the frozen continent are being flown to a remote US Navy base at Gow Island but disaster strikes the aircraft and it has to make an emergency landing. There is only one survivor, the pilot, and he’s in no condition to tell anything of the odd events that caused the aerial mishap.

Before very long personnel at the base start to disappear and then turn up dead. Of course if you’re a horror movie fan then at this point you’ll be suspecting that those plant samples belonged to giant walking carnivorous plants. And you’d be spot on! It takes a while for the base’s resident scientists to catch on.

This particular base doesn’t seem to be especially well equipped - when the killer plants cut the wires to the generator the task of repairing the damage is quite beyond the capabilities of the personnel here. The officer in charge, Lt Charlie Brown (Anthony Eisley), eventually realises the full significance of the menace posed by these vicious plants. The only way of stopping them seems to be by using fire.

There’s the expected romantic sub-plot involving beautiful Navy nurse Nora Hall (Mamie van Doren), and there are the usual conflicts between the Navy people and the somewhat irritable civilian meteorologist. 

It’s played to a large extent for laughs, and the comic elements are rather heavy going. But this is very much standard drive-in fodder so you expect that sort of thing. On the plus side there’s plenty of enjoyably goofy technobabble. And the monsters are as cheesy as one could possibly desire.

The acting is exactly what you expect in a low-budget drive-in movie. Oddly enough Mamie van Doren isn’t given to many opportunities to show off the spectacularly voluptuous figure that made her a B-movie queen. As an actress her abilities are strictly limited but they’re more than adequate for his role.

Of course you know that sooner or later someone will decide to all in an air strike by Navy bombers to pulverise those rampaging killer shrubs, or in this case to zap them with napalm. Half a dozen aircraft duly arrive, and in each shot they strangely metamorphose into entirely different types of aircraft. That sort of thing is one of the great joys of low-budget sci-fi movies. 

It’s not overly scary but even at the time the picture was released it was essentially an exercise in campy silly fun and on that level it works admirably. I certainly enjoyed it.

The Region 1 DVD comes to us from an outfit called Cheezy Flicks. They don’t seem to have done a great deal in the way of restoration but these days we have to be grateful that such obscurities are being released on DVD at all. 

If you’re in the mood for a popcorn movie you could do a lot worse than The Navy vs. the Night Monsters. Recommended.

Bikini Beach (1964)

Bikini Beach was the third movie in the very successful series of beach party movies released by American International Pictures. Once again Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon are the stars.

It’s summer again and it’s time for teenagers to head for the beach. Frankie (Frankie Avalon), Dee Dee (Annette Funicello) and all the gang are looking forward to surfing and partying but not everyone is happy. Harvey Huntington Honeywagon III (Keenan Wynn), who runs a nearby old folks’ home, is not happy. He considers modern teenagers to be depraved. He has taught his monkey Clyde to surf in order to prove his theory that monkeys have about the same intelligence as teenagers. Honeywagon is also leading a local campaign to have the beach (known popularly as Bikini Beach) closed to surfers.

The kids get some support from local school teacher Vivien Clements (played by Martha Hyer). 

Also on hand, and about to be drawn into this epic struggle, are Big Drag (Don Rickles), Eric von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck) and Potato Bug. Big Drag runs the cafe where the surfers hang out and also runs the local drag strip. Eric von Zipper (as anyone who was seen the earlier AIP beach party movies knows) is the leader of the Rats and Mice motorcycle gang. As for Potato Bug, he’s an aristocratic British pop star who is also a drag racing enthusiast. Frankie Avalon plays Potato Bug and does so in an outrageously over-the-top manner that almost allows us to forget that British pop stars in the 60s were nothing whatever like this.

There’s naturally a romantic triangle, the gimmick being that both of Annette Funicello’s suitors are played by Frankie Avalon. The gimmick gets pushed even further in one scene with one of the Frankie Avalon characters impersonating the other.

Eric von Zipper of course has a nefarious plot brewing, which he executes with his usual total incompetence. Meanwhile Honeywagon seems to be falling for the charms of the school teacher - does this mean he’ll soften his attitude towards the kids?

Adding drag racing to the mix provides a bit of variety for those audience members who might have been tiring of surfing by this time.

Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello are as likeable as ever and their acting is more than adequate. Don Rickles chews the scenery amusingly and he’s more amiable than we expect Rickles to be. Keenan Wynn as Honeywagon has perhaps the film’s most rewarding role and he makes the most of it. Towards the end there’s a brief cameo by one of AIP’s biggest stars (this being a device used in the earlier Beach Party as well).

The music is actually pretty good. In fact it’s great. The movie opens with Bikini Beach which is a terrific song. The musical highlights though are the couple of songs by surf rock band The Pyramids.

Apart from helming no less than five of AIP’s beach party movies director William Asher worked mostly in television. He does a pretty good job with Bikini Beach, keeping the mood light and breezy and not allowing the pacing to drag. The two set-pieces that provide the film’s climax, a wild chase followed by a wild fight in Big Drag’s joint, are done with plenty of energy and playfulness. There are quite a few process shots in the chase sequence but for a low-budget movie made in 1964 they’re not done too badly. 

Asher also pulls off some decent visual gags. The humour is a nice mix of slapstick and verbal gags.

Bikini Beach was paired with Beach Party as an MGM Midnite Movies DVD release. Bikini Beach is letterboxed and not anamorphic but the transfer is generally pretty good. There are no extras. Beach Party is definitely worth seeing as well so this DVD is excellent value. Bikini Beach is also available as part of an eight-movie Annette Funicello-Frankie Avalon DVD boxed set, the transfers being identical to the earlier Midnite Movies releases.

Bikini Beach is a silly light-hearted but genuinely amusing and entirely harmless romp with some great songs. Highly recommended.

Carry On Henry (1971)

Carry On Henry was perhaps the last of the great Carry On films. The franchise declined during the 70s as changing tastes forced the films to become more overtly crude, and as the regular cast members slowly dropped by the wayside. Carry On Henry has most of the old team still in place and and still at the top of their game. It also benefits from remarkably  high production values and a genuinely clever script by Talbot Rothwell.

I’ve always been particularly fond of the historical Carry On movies - they seemed to be ideally suited to the Carry On treatment.

Henry VIII, having disposed of one unwanted wife, is looking forward to his marriage with Marie of Normandy (Joan Sims). He has been assured that she is a rare beauty and it is also a politically advantageous match, Marie being a favourite cousin of the King of France. This time he is certain he has married wisely and everything seems to be going swimmingly until the wedding night when Henry makes a horrific discovery on his wedding night - his new queen is addicted to garlic. And Henry cannot bear the thought of even being in the same room as someone who has eaten garlic, much less sharing a bed with her.

Of course the marriage must be annulled but there are difficulties. In fact Rothwell’s script throws in a whole series of hilarious difficulties as Henry constantly changes his mind. He doesn’t want his new queen but he does want the very generous present the King of France has offered him to celebrate this illustrious marriage. Further complications ensue - the queen becomes pregnant but Henry knows that whoever the father is it certainly isn’t him. Suspicion falls on Henry’s equerry, Sir Roger de Lodgerley (Charles Hawtrey). 

And Henry has his eye on a new prospective queen - the voluptuous Bettina (Barbara Windsor).

Somehow his chief advisers, his Chancellor Thomas Cromwell (Kenneth Williams) and Cardinal Wolsey (Terry Scott), have to find a way to do the impossible - to keep Henry happy, to keep the King of France happy, to keep the Vatican happy and find a way for Henry to get his hands on both the French king’s 50,000 gold pieces and the luscious Bettina. They also have to deal with a plot by the disaffected Lord Hampton of Wick (Kenneth Connor) to overthrow the king.

For a comedy film it’s quite an involved plot but it sets up a whole series of inspired farcical situations. While the screenplay is filled to overflowing with sexual innuendo it’s all good-natured harmless fun that never descends into outright crudity. There are gags in abundance and they’re very very funny.

Barbara Windsor does have a couple of brief nude scenes but surprisingly enough they actually have something to do with the plot.

This was the 21st Carry On movie and by this time the regulars knew how to get the maximum in laughs from any script and this time they are given terrific material to work with. Kenneth Williams is in scintillating form and he and Terry Scott make a superb team as the hapless constantly conspiring advisers. Sid James is perfect as the randy but perpetually frustrated Henry. Barbara Windsor is at her bubbly best. Joan Sims gets one of her best roles in the series and delivers one of the ripest French accents you’ll ever hear. Charles Hawtrey gets a bigger role than usual and takes foppishness further than anyone could possibly imagine it could be taken. Kenneth Connor has a fairly small part but makes the most of it. The supporting players get their chances as well, especially Julian Orchard’s outrageous turn as the French ambassador, the aptly named Duc de Poncenay.

Gerald Thomas directed every single Carry On movie. Apart from being very good at directing comedy he was a master of the art of bringing in a low-budget movie on schedule and on budget. 

The film was shot at Pinewood Studios and makes use of some magnificent sets (presumably built for bigger budgeted movies). The costumes are quite stunning. Cinematographer Alan Hume made sixteen Carry On movies and knew how to get good results without wasting unnecessary time. Carry On Henry was a very cheap movie but it actually looks quite lavish and rather polished. It shows what can be done on a tight budget when you have a cast of crew of seasoned professionals who get on with the job.

The ITV Studios DVD, from their Carry On: The Ultimate Collection boxed set, includes a number of extras. There’s a extremely short contemporary “making of” featurette which is worth watching for a very brief but screamingly funny interview with Kenneth Williams. There’s also an audio commentary featuring cinematographer Alan Hume who remembers the making of the movie as being non-stop fun.

Watching the movie is also non-stop fun. It’s not only the best of the later Carry Ons, it’s also one of the best of the whole series. Very highly recommended.

The Brain Eaters (1958)

The Brain Eaters is a 1958 AIP science fiction/horror release based on Robert A. Heinlein’s classic paranoia novel The Puppet Masters. No-one at AIP bothered to get Heinlein’s permission and he promptly sued them and won. He received $5,000 and a promise his name would not be used on the credits since he hated the movie. Heinlein may have been right in feeling this was not much of a movie but like so many of AIP’s offerings it’s actually quite a bit of fun.

The small town of Riverdale Illinois is the scene of several murders after the landing of a mysterious spaceship. The spaceship, like all good 50s science fiction movie spaceships, is impervious to heat, explosive and in fact it’s impervious to just about everything. It does however have a circular entrance but when scientist Dr Paul Kettering (Ed Nelson) crawls inside to investigate he finds that the passageway just spirals around and comes back out at the same place.

The mayor of Riverdale is an early victim. He goes crazy and a sheriff’s deputy shoots him. The autopsy reveals something rather disturbing - something very strange affixed to the back of his neck. As well will learn later it’s a kind of parasite. We assume it’s from the spaceship but actually the story is a bit more complicated (and cleverer) than that.

The parasite turns a person into a kind of zombie and just as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers the scary bit is that these zombies seem quite normal. They could be anywhere!

Senator Walter K. Powers (Cornelius Keefe) has arrived on the scene determined to debunk the whole affair but he soon realises the spaceship scare is no hoax. He and Dr Kettering must find a way to defeat the parasites but although they recruit a few allies from the townspeople it’s soon apparent that the parasites have already taken over a lot of people so no-one can really be trusted.

The plot more or less follows the standard pattern for these kinds of “invaders amongst us” movies although it does slip in a couple of interesting twists. The basic idea was clearly lifted from Heinlein’s novel but the movie’s plot differs quite a bit from that of the book.

The big question is - what do the parasites want? The answer to that is not going to surprise anyone familiar with 50s American sci-fi.

Ed Nelson is quite adequate as the hero. Some of the supporting actors aren’t too great but they’re no worse than you expect in a low-budget movie. Look out for Leonard Nimoy in a small part. You won’t recognise him but you should recognise the voice.

The special effects are about as good as could be managed on the very very tight budget. The spaceship is quite interesting with its spiralling passageway. The sets are basic and there was certainly no money for spectacular set-pieces although the climactic scenes around the spaceship are fairly well done.

Bruno VeSota had a long career as a character actor and a much shorter one as a director. He did however helm one excellent little low-budget film noir, Female Jungle, in 1955. He obviously decided that The Brain Eaters was the type of film that would benefit from copious use of Dutch angles, a sometimes very effective technique that he does at times go rather overboard with. VeSota was however a competent director and within the limitations of the very very small budget he had to work with he does a fine job and he manages to pull off some effectively creepy and scary moments.

This is a movie that is obviously going to be compared to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The premise is very similar and the atmosphere of paranoia is almost identical. Viewers do need to bear in mind that Don Siegel was a great director and had a bit more money to play around with. VeSota is no in the Siegel class but he gives it his best shot and he certainly doesn’t disgrace himself.

The Brain Eaters is available on DVD in Region 2 in the Arkoff Film Library series from DVD Rights. It’s barebones but the transfer is good.

The Brain Eaters is the sort of movie that trendy snarky film buffs love to rubbish but it’s actually not a bad little movie. It has a decent premise, it has a certain amount of atmosphere, it’s quite well-made and it has its creepy moments. Considering the minuscule budget it’s an entertaining and fairly effective sci-fi/horror tale and there’s no reason why fans of 50s sci-fi should not thoroughly enjoy it. Recommended.

Santo contra los zombies (Santo vs The Zombies, 1962)

Although Mexican wrestling star and pop culture icon had appeared in a couple of earlier movies it was Santo contra los zombies (Santo vs The Zombies) that really started the Santo movie craze. Santo would eventually appear in 52 luchador (wrestling hero) films.

Santo was actually Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta (1917-1984) and he played a large role in making professional wrestling into a major sport in Mexico.

The Santo movies all follow pretty much the same formula. Santo is a legendary masked wrestler who in his spare time is a daring masked crime-fighter. He fights not only criminal gangs but monsters, vampires, invaders from outer space and in this particular film, zombies.

The plot can be disposed of fairly quickly - if you’re watching a Santo movie for the plot then you’re missing the point. A professor has disappeared mysteriously. He had an interest in the subject of voodoo and zombies. As it happens zombies are being employed in a series of robberies. There is of course a diabolical criminal mastermind at the back of all this.

The police are baffled. The police chief decide it’s time to call on Santo’s help. Fortunately he has a direct radio-television link from his office to Santo’s headquarters. The professor’s daughter and her boyfriend are also involved in trying to find her missing father.

The zombie bad guys make an attempt to kidnap children from an orphanage, the children presumably to be used in experiments on zombification. The diabolical criminal mastermind knows that Santo is on his trail because he has a special television viewer that allows him to keep an eye on anything that he might need to know about.

It’s all just an excuse for lots of action. As in all Santo movies the action includes quite a lot of wrestling scenes but in this case at least one of the wrestling matches does serve an important plot purpose as Santo has to fight a zombified wrestler.

Needless to say at some point the bad guys kidnap the missing professor’s beautiful daughter, intending to turn her into a lady zombie. Can Santo find her in time to save her from this awful fate?

The feel of the movie is very close to that of Hollywood serials of the 30s and 40s and in fact the plot could have been lifted from one of those serials. Given the worldwide popularity of the Hollywood serials and the love of Mexican audiences for action adventure stories it’s fair to assume that those serials were very popular in Mexico and that this movie is very consciously modeling itself on them. And it does so very successfully.

The acting is of passable B-movie standard. Santo may not have been much of an actor but he has plenty of physical presence and enough superhero-type charisma to carry him through.

Director Benito Alazraki doesn’t try to get too clever (he would have had neither the time nor the money to do so) but he knows how to keep the action moving long nicely. and he does throw in a couple of dutch angles late in the film. This is obviously a low-budget film but the sets are quite serviceable, there’s some fun silly scientific paraphernalia in the mad scientist’s laboratory and the remote viewing televisions are handled quite well.

The Mexican film industry was always pretty good at achieving spooky atmosphere on very low budgets and Santo contra los zombies has some quite effectively moody scenes.

The Cinematográfica Rodríguez Region 1 and 4 DVD offers a very decent transfer, in Spanish with English subtitles.

Santo contra los zombies has no ambitions to do anything other than offer great fun-filled entertainment and it succeeds superbly in doing just that. This film is pure enjoyment. If you’re never seen a Santo movie this is as good a place as any to start and if you’re a confirmed fan you’ll certainly love this one. Tragically only a small proportion of the Santo movies are available in English-friendly editions but among those that are you’ll certainly want to check out Santo in the Wax Museum (1963), Santo Versus the Martian Invasion (1967) and Santo and Blue Demon vs. Doctor Frankenstein (1974).

Highly recommended.