Susan Hayward was a Hollywood original and we simply can’t get enough of her. Below are the super soapy trailers for I Thank A Fool (1962) in which Hayward does time for euthanasia and then goes to work for the mysterious Peter Finch, the man who prosecuted her case. In Ada (1961) she makes her way from the whorehouse to the state house by hooking up with Dean Martin.
The name basically says it all when it comes to Hillbillys in a Haunted House(1967). A group of entertainers, on their way to a Nashville jamboree, stop and spend the night at an old haunted mansion. Unbknownst to our singing trio, some bad guys are using the basement as a base of operations for stealing some sort of secret formula from the next town over. The villains include genre stalwarts John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr. and Basil Rathbone. Why, even George Barrows (Robot Monster, 1953) is on hand as Anatole, the henchman gorilla.
Part horror/comedy and part musical, Hillbillys is essentially a mess. What little plot there is stops dead whenever it’s time for a song. Your enjoyment of the film will vary depending on your tolerance for old school country music. Still, there is a colorful, half-assed charm to the proceedings. Besides, it’s always fun to watch Joi Lansing do what she does best… looking pretty while lip-syncing badly. Below is a clip of one of Joi’s more surreal moments. Gowns, gowns indeed!
Happy Birthday to the legendary Czecholovakian figure skater turned actress Vera Hruba Ralston! Be sure to check out Vera’s star turn in this months CCT feature review, the Republic western from 1954, Jubilee Trail.
I’m not really sure what to say about Final Exam (1981). The story follows the generic slasher-film template, killer stalks pretty girls on college campus, but an attempt by writer/director Jimmy Huston (My Best Friend is a Vampire, 1988) to make the narrative “character driven” fails completely. Mundane chats amongst the college students take up way too much screen time. A unimaginative script, amateurish acting, and really low production values make Final Exam one of the dullest slasher films of the 1980’s. Still, there is some things that might intrigue the die-hard bad movie buff.
There’s an elaborate fraternity prank in which a terrorist attack is staged on campus so that a quarterback can cheat on his finals. There’s the weirdly miscast Joel S. Rice as Radish, the lovable nerd. Radish is implausibly in love with the films mousy heroine. No one in the film seems to notice that he’s clearly a “friend of Dorthy”. At least Rice’s swishy demeanor makes each of his scenes oddly memorable.
Finally, I’d like to tell you who the killer is and why he hacked-up most of the cast. Seriously, I’d like to… but I can’t, because the film never bothers to explain this teensy little plot point. Since people die everyday, for no reason whatsoever, the filmmakers purposely left the identity of the killer a mystery. It’s more realistic that way.
Oy vey.
Check out Final Exam, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
We loved her in The Carpetbaggers (1964) and her version of Harlow(1965). Check out her freaky forays into foreign films like Baba Yaga (1973), Cyclone (1978) and Umberto Lenzi’s Paranoia (1970).
Actor John Ashley once co-starred alongside Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in films such as Beach Party (1964), Muscle Beach Party (1964) and Bikini Beach(1964). Later in his career he would team up with writer/producer/director Eddie Romero for a series of low-budget horror and action flicks shot in the Philippines, drive-in classics like Brides of Blood (1968), Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968), The Beast of the Yellow Night (1971) and Savage Sisters (1974). The Twilight People (1973) is their take on The Island of Dr. Moreau with a little of Most Dangerous Game thrown in for good measure. Ashley’s character, Matt Farrell, is kidnapped while scuba-diving and taken to a remote island where an evil doctor is doing unnatural human/animal experiments. The doc has a cute daughter that Matt kinda digs, but decides to split when he learns that he will be the doctors next guinea pig. The second half of the movie details the adventures of Matt, the animal hybrid experiments, the doctor and the doctors huntsman enforcer as they stumble trough the jungle looking for a means of escape. Considering it’s low-budget limitations, The Twilight People is a fairly decent and well-paced action/adventure. The animal make-up effects are decent, but Darmo the bat-man would be ridiculous under any circumstances no matter what the films budget. It’s obvious that Ashley is in ‘cool-guy’ Steve McQueen mode here, underplaying several of his scenes so that you begin to wonder if he’s even awake. The Twilight People is available on DVD from VCI entertainment. The movie is presented full-frame and picture quality is fair. This isn’t a deluxe edition by any means. A few trailers and some actor biographies are the only extras. It should also be mentioned that The Twilight People has what may be the coolest opening title credit ever… Pam Grier as The Panther Woman. Come on, that’s seriously badass no matter how you look at it.
Birthday girl Barbara Parkins is part of the the all-star cast in Amicus’ horror anthology Asylum (1972).
You can watch Asylum online in its entirety at AMC’s B-Movie Classics.
Novelist Harold Robbins is best know for his “trashy” bestsellers. Luckily for us, most of that literary “trash” has been adapted into bad movie gold. We simply can’t get enough of The Lonely Lady (1983), The Adventurers (1970) or Where Love Has Gone (1964). Below is the trailer for another one of our Robbins favorites, The Carpetbaggers (1964).
Former starlet Diane McBain co-starred alongside some of Hollywood’s greatest stars in some of our favorite cinematic guilty pleasures. She romanced Troy Donahue in Parrish(1961) and survived Joan Crawford in the nut-house drama The Caretakers (1963). Below are the trailers for the babes on bikes flick The Mini-Skirt Mob (1968) and the duo-vision classic Wicked, Wicked (1973).
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