Big Bad B Movie Blog

Release: 1951 Director: Curt Siodmak Production Company: Jack Broder Productions Inc. Notable Cast: Lon Chaney Jr.   as Police Commissioner Taro Raymond Burr  as Barney Chavez Tom Conway  as Dr. Viet Paul Cavanagh  as Klaas Van Gelder Plot: Barney Chavez murders his boss to take his wife. The crime is witnessed by a local witch who then curses him. At night suddenly Barney starts becoming a gorilla. The Monster: So read below because the answer here is man. MAN!!!! How's that for a Twilight Zone kind of swerve for this one. There is a guy in a gorilla guy a couple of times but as we find out, there never was any gorilla. It was man all along... Thoughts: This is only the 10th movie I have reviewed for this blog so I don't have any sort of formalized process for how I approach a review yet. To this point I have tried to go for a mix of movies I have seen and movies I am less familiar with. I have been trying really hard to just not go down a list of m...

Release: 1954 Director: Jack Arnold Production Company: Universal Pictures Notable Cast: Richard Carlson   as David Reed Julie Adams  as Kay Lawrence Richard Denning  as Mark Williams Plot: A strange fossil discovery leads to an expedition to try and find the rest of the remains. The crew of the ship soon run into the Gill-Man who is a bigger menace than they were ready for. The Monster: The Gill-Man is a true icon of Hollywood monsters. He's right up there with Dracula, Frankenstein , Jason, etc as being one of the most recognizable Hollywood creatures of all time. Any sort of collection of famous monsters will have the Gill-man in it. The Gill-Man himself appears to be fairly strong and can obviously breathe under water. He also seems to possess about human level intelligence. His scaly skin also seems to give him some level of invulnerability. He takes a harpoon shot at one point and mostly shrugs it off. Thoughts: This wasn't on my list for movies I ...

Release: 1958 Director: Nathan Hertz Company: Woolner Bros. Pictures Notable Cast: Allison Hayes   as Nancy Fowler Archer William Hudson  as Harry Archer Yvette Vickers  as Honey Parker Roy Gordon  as Dr. Isaac Cushing Ken Terrell  as Jess Stout Plot: Nancy Fowler encounters a satellite and a giant alien in the satellite. No one believes her. Meanwhile her husband has been scheming to get Nancy back to the sanatorium so that he can take over her sizable estate. They go out to the desert to search after coming to an agreement. They encounter the alien again and Harry leaves her for dead. Nancy later turns up delirious and grows to a gigantic size while being cared for. She wakes up and goes on a rampage looking for her husband. The Monster:  Nancy Fowler grows to be 50 feet tall. Being 50 feet tall makes her stronger and harder to kill obviously. Bullets seem to have little effect as they had to kill her by shooting an electrical transform...

Release: 1958 Director: Roger Corman Company: Santa Cruz Productions Notable Actors: Dick Miller   as Dave Boyer Susan Cabot  as Sybil Carrington Richrd Devon  as Dr. Pol Van Ponder Michael Fox  as Jason ibn Akad Robert Shayne  as Cole Hotchkiss Bruno VeSota  as Mr. LeMoine Roy Gordon  as The President Plot: A race of aliens declares they are protecting the universe from the human race who are beginning to experiment with space travel. Humanity as a response becomes more determined to conquer the stars. The aliens replace one of the members of the space project and works to cancel the program behind the scenes. When that fails we head to space as the human race is going to try and break the barrier set up by the aliens. Who will win in this space race war? The Monster: Our impostor is from a race that call themselves the Masters of the Spiral Nebula Ghana. So we never see what the alien looks like in it's true form we do get a see a ...

Release: 1959 Director: Roger Corman Company: The Filmgroup Notable Cast: Susan Cabot  as Janice Starlin Anthony Eisley   as Bill Lane Michael Mark  as Eric Zinthrop Frank Gerstle  as Les Hellman Roy Gordon  as Paul Thompson Bruno VeSota  as Night Watchman Plot: Janice Starlin is the owner of a large cosmetics company. Sales have been dropping and the theory is that it is due to Starlin's aging appearance. A doctor has been able to extract enzymes for wasp queen royal jelly. He begins to experiment with this new drug on animals. Janice becomes impatient with the slowness of the experiments and begins taking the drug behind the doctors back. The drug has an immediate impact as Janice becomes much younger almost overnight. Not all is well as the test animals begin to become uncontrollably violent. This of course leads to Janice transforming into The Wasp Woman! The Monster: There was some false advertising going on here as the creature i...

Release: 1963 Director: Herbert L. Strock Company: A Joseph F. Robertson Production Notable Cast: Alan Hale  as Sheriff Townsend Kent Taylor  as Dr. Max Weitzberg Allison Hayes  as Donna Peter Breck  as Steve Curan Plot: An astronaut is returning to Earth after a mission to the moon. Mission control gets an odd message from the astronaut, who long ago ran out of oxygen, and he vaguely describes being possessed. He convinces mission control to blow up the spacecraft. Later Paul and his girlfriend Marta come across the severed hand of the astronaut while on the beach the next day. Paul decides, for whatever reason, to take the arm home with him after the fact. The hand murders Paul's landlady later that evening and begins to take control of Paul. The space agency come to town when the finger prints on the landlady match those of the dead astronaut. Paul while under the influence of the alien attacks Marta and later the owner of a local diner. The cli...

Editors note: Yeah, this one isn't getting any better. Let's get this train wreck on the road! Release: 1964 Director: Vic Savage (A.J. Nelson) Company: Metropolitan International Pictures Notable Cast: Haha, good one! Plot: An alien lands on Earth and wanders around eating people. The local sheriff and military try to find the monster while investigating the strange alien ship. The Monster: The best way to describe this Creeping Terror is that it's a mutated shag carpet from outer space. The monster moves at about the pace of a sloth as people flail about for minutes waiting for the inevitable demise. The creature is immune to small arms fire but can be blown up. It is also immune to guitar attacks so Jeff Jarrett would be ineffective in against this monster. I usually try to post an image of the creatures from these movies but there really isn't a good image that captures the sheer absurdity of it. I highly recommend watching the Dance Hall video I p...

I swear, I didn't set out to do two kaiju films right off the bat. I was writing the review of Varan and this came across the recommends on Amazon. I will get into things a little later on but this is probably one of my favorite of the Showa era of Godzilla films. Release Date: March 15, 1975 Director: Ishiro Honda Company: Toho Plot: This film picks up in the aftermath of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. While searching for the remains of Mechagodzilla, a submarine encounters a new monster. This leads to an investigation that introduces as to a mad scientist named Dr. Mafune. The aliens return and propose an alliance that would see Titanosaurus and Mechagodzilla team up. There are a lot of parts and pieces to the plots of this movie. Katsura is one of the more tragic figures in a Godzilla movie. She is a cyborg that was created after suffering severe injures during one of her father's experiments. She ends up being one of the most memorable characters in any Godzilla mov...

Note: This review is for the United States cut of the movie. It is basically an entirely different movie. I hope to revisit the Japanese version of Varan at a later date. Release: 1958 (Japan), 1962 (United States) Director: Ishiro Honda (Japan), Jerry A. Baerwitz (United States) Company: Toho Notable Cast: Myron Healey as Commander James Bradley Haruo Nakajima as Varan Plot: Navy Commander Jim Bradley is sent to Japan. His goal is to test a chemical that will desalinate water. These tests wake up a monster referred to as Obaki. It rampages a bit before being defeated. The Monster: Varan isn’t a bad kaiju. He’s a cool lizard with spikes on his back. You don’t get to see the scene in this movie but he can fly around like a flying squirrel. I would say he’s one of the better designs I have run across in this type of movie. Varan in Godzilla NES game. Varan does exist in the same universe as Godzilla. I first encountered him in the original Godzilla...

I was super into dinosaurs as a kid. I might have the year wrong but there was some sort of TV Special about dinosaurs with Christopher Reeve around 1986. The special was mostly about the t-rex but it showed a lot of clips of dinosaurs from various sci-fi and horror movies. Honestly, it was pretty awesome. There was one clip though, that really stood out and I had to see this movie: The fight scene between King Kong and the T-Rex. I was captivated, the fight was awesome and as a kid into dinosaurs, beating a T-Rex was no small feat.Unfortunately, this was the 1980s and VHS was still relatively a new medium. So my parents checked the various video rental places around us but sadly there was no King Kong to be had. We did eventually find that film and it was as awesome as I had imagined it would be. But before finding it I came across this VHS at a store one day and I was intrigued by it. King Kong vs. Godzilla was the first time I had seen a kaiju film. My parents agreed to purch...

Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954)  - **** Bride of the Gorilla (1951)  - ***1/2 Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)  - *** Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)  - *** War of the Satellites (1958)  - **1/2 The Black Hole (1979)  - ** The Crawling Hand (1963)  - ** The Wasp Woman (1959)  - *1/2 Varan The Unbelievable (1958) - *1/2 Bride of the Monster (1955)  - * The Creeping Terror (1964)  - DUD

A: Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)  - *** B: Bride of the Gorilla (1951)  - ***1/2 Bride of the Monster (1955)  - * C: Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954)  - **** T: Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)  - *** The Black Hole (1979)  - ** The Crawling Hand (1963)  - ** The Creeping Terror (1964)  - DUD The Wasp Woman (1959)  - *1/2 V: Varan The Unbelievable (1958) - *1/2 W: War of the Satellites (1958)  - **1/2

This is a list of the films that have received **** ratings. Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954)  - ****

This is a list of all the movies to have received a DUD review. The Creeping Terror (1964)