Ten Statements About....MONSTER a.k.a MONSTROID, IT CAME FROM THE LAKE, TOXIC HORROR (1980)

"You looking at me?  You LOOKING at me?  I don't see
any other monsters here..."

"You're crazy if you think I'm gonna spend the night outside this stupid lake fighting off mosquitos waiting for you to get a stupid picture of a stupid monster that'll probably turn out to be a stupid log or something."

1) The first sign that this film is going to be glorious awful?  The title card that starts it saying it's based on a true story that took place in 1971....

2) I did a double take when I was looking for the release date for this movie.  It supposedly came out in 1980, but it's got that shot-on-16mm, lack-of-artisty look that makes it feel like a product ten or more years earlier.  The film looks primitive, and the writing (with its whole ecological concern subplot and sexual politics--more on which below), and acting gives it a the feel of one of those 'let's put on a show' exploitation films that would make its rounds on regional drive in circuits circa, well, 1971.

"Okay, I'm going to hang around naked in this lake.
Glad there's no monsters about...."

3) Another reason why this feels so retro is the way women are treated in this film--namely, as things to look pretty and sleep around with.  There's this strange sub-plot where every man who works for the multinational organization that owns the concrete plant this film is based around is apparently sleeping with his secretary.  And when Chris Mitchum (more on him below) shows up in his safari shorts to troubleshoot, he automatically falls in bed with the environmentally conscious reporter gal who is set up to be one of the opposition....well, just because.

4) Now here's a reason I can almost accept that this film was made in 1980....there are a couple of stylistic choices writer/director Kenneth Hartford makes that shows the influence of certain low-budget horror films from around the same time--in particular, the way the exposition is delivered directly to camera, as if the viewer and not Mitchum is Bill the Trouble Shooter.

5) Boy, does John Carradine act as if he's in an entirely different movie.  Granted, this is during the period in his career where he was drunk off his ass and taking any job that would have him, but his performance as the village priest here seems off for a film where everyone seems off.

6) All the women in this film serve almost purely decorative purposes, half of them are here only to sleep with the significantly older male leads, and one is here only to wear a bikini very, very well before being munched by the monster.  Oddly enough, the sexiest of these women is the helicopter pilot, who doesn't sleep with an older male lead or wear a bikini (and, to be fair, has a weird-ass accent that could be Columbian, could be some girl's idea of Columbian).

7) Here's an unintended benefit of this film being so low budget....since the bulk of the monster's scenes are shot in the dead of night, the primitive film stock makes the creature only perceivable in bits and pieces, and those bits and pieces seems pretty scary.

"I'm going to radio for a better script..."

8) ...which is why it's unfortunate that the climax takes place in broad daylight, because the ultimate monster is, ummmm, goofy as all Hell.  This thing, with its Fu Manchu mustache, gnashing jaws that don't join and goggly eyes, is just ridiculous looking.  I can't even decide if this was a full-sized model or a hand-puppet or some combination of both.

9) Chris Mitchum....sigh.  He certainly looks totally out of place in this film, and is the hero only incidentally.  He spends the majority of the film stomping around in some very unfortunate safari shorts (made even more unfortunate since he's the only one stomping around in those things, exposing his too-knobby-knees), and only takes some form of physical action at the very end, when he chases a trigger box in the lake for about five minutes.

10) This film counted in its cast residents of citizens in a town in Columbia, and in New Mexico...and damn, does it show given the number of very lame line readings and endless shots of a Columbia 'fiesta.'

Overall...with all its flaws--and its flaws are legion--this is a welcome and goofy throwback to a 50's monster movie, apparently made in the early 70's in spite of its 1980's origin.  If you're in a certain mood, this film can be entertaining for its faults.

Ten Statements About....INVISIBLE INVADERS (1959)

"So I stand here with this test tube and...wait, what are you
doing with that stick of TNT?"

"Long ago we learned to change the molecular structure of our bodies. You cannot see us. I am using this dead man's body so that I can communicate with you."

1) You really can tell the kind of film you've decided to invest your time in when, after we've sat through a 'Voice-O'-Doom' announcer setting the tone, we get a shot of John Carridane appearing all scientist-y...and then John Carradine blows up.

2) ...except that after the film sets up the plot--there are these invaders kinda hanging out on the moon, they're invisible to the human eye, they're coming to possess our dead and wipe us out if we don't surrender--it gets really, really dark. Hell, at points it almost becomes a post-apocalyptic tale.

3) Was John Carradine the kind of guy who just needed to work constantly? I ask this because I do think his propensity to appear in pretty much any film that would have him did his reputation wrong, which is a pity because Carradine is very good as an old school actor. In this film, he pretty much has one scene as the alien-possessed scientist who gives his colleague Dr. Penner (melodramatically assayed by Philip Tonge) the initial warning...and all I could think of is how much more of him I wanted to see of him. Carradine works this one scene and makes the aliens seem rather scary.

4) You positively have to give director Edward L. Cahn credit. This film had to have been made for a budget of pretty much pocket lint and yet through prodigious use of stock footage and narration and repeating key scenes multiple times (in one case superimposing an alien/zombie hybrid horde coming over a hill with stock footage to give greater weight to the narrator's insistence that the Earth has been hobbled by a wave of sabotage attacks) gives it a little more scope than it has the right to have.

"yep...I'm gonna rock your mini-van lovin' world..."

5) That being said, some of the stock footage use comes off as unintentionally hilarious--like when the aliens choose to give their second warning to the world, they do so at a semi-pro hockey game in Syracuse. Good job getting all of the world to pay attention to you there...

6) Boy, John Agar sure is smooth when it comes to picking up matronly daughters of overacting scientists during the zombie apocalypse. He'd be a real MiLF killer if he was alive for the coming one...

7) I love how the fact that no one believes that Dr. Penner has met an alien zombie promising invasion, and that is the lead story in every paper we see. Was this the slowest news day ever?.

"Booo!  I's da Michelin Monsta!"

8) Good idea making the aliens invisible, since our one glimpse of what they look like at the end makes us think we were going to be dominated by a race of Michelin Tire Men.

9) I suspect that this is one of the earliest examples of a Horror Film Disguised As A Science Fiction Film, since after the twenty minute mark this almost comes off as a dry-run for Night of The Living Dead, with a group of survivors holed up in a secure place while zombies sort of mill around outside being menacing.

10) Make no bones about this--the science part of this science fiction film, from its contention that the moon has been inhabited by invisible alien for thousand of years to the solution for killing the aliens (sonics!) is dubious at best...thus my 'Horror Film Disguised As A Science Fiction Film' contention.

Overall...at turns hilarious and pretty damn dark, this is a rather interesting curiosity both as a harbinger of the zombie-crazed firmament to come and as an example of how to approach micro-budgeted genre filmmaking.