Well, we're all going to do the Thanksgiving thing...get stuffed on turkey with all the dressing and then plunk down to digest it with a little boob tube...but why not mix a little horror with the cranberry sauce? Instead of football, consider these...
By DAVE DUGGINS
Okay. Picture this. It’s Thanksgiving Day. The bird has been demolished; you’ve had your hair pulled and your shins kicked by your adorable seven-year-old cousin; you’ve been repeatedly kissed and cuddled by your Great Aunt Ruthie, who drank most of the white whine before it was served with the turkey. Now, everyone’s either snoring in easy chairs or recounting fascinating details about daily life twenty-five years before you were born.
Real-life horrors, folks. We’ve got enough of ‘em. There is only one solution to a problem like this: hit the TV room and plug your favorite turkeys into the VCR!
No, I don’t mean the bird. I mean turkeys as in the worst horror movies you can get your rancid little paws on! I mean the most awful, putrid, wretched, ridiculous and unintentionally funny flicks you can find!
Renfield, in his infinite bug-gobbling wisdom, has reigned in my enthusiasm by keeping me to five truly awful flicks, which is a) about as many as you can fit into Thanksgiving afternoon and b) about as many as you can stomach before becoming physically ill -- especially after the traditional Turkey Day gluttony.
As always, I’m going to pick my favorites. I give honorable mention here to Plan 9 From Outer Space, which is probably the most well-known of awful horror movies, but I won’t include it in my list. It’s been done to death. Ha! Get it, kiddies? Done to … ahem. Yes. Onward.
Dr. Dave’s Number One Thanksgiving Day Turkey:
It
Conquered the World. One of those great
American International flicks, starring Peter Graves, Lee Van
Cleef and Beverly Garland. Graves also starred in the fairly
wretched 
Beginning of the
End, while Garland gave a sterling
performance (NOT) in the truly abysmal Alligator
People. But this one doesn’t make this
list because of Peter Graves, and it doesn’t make the list
because of Beverly Garland (who apparently changed her hair color
for every film she made). I mean, I could go on about the
terrible acting, the obvious, contrived plot, ludicrous dialogue.
But this movie makes the list because of "It" -- the Giant Cucumber from Venus. In the trailers for the film, this monster looks pretty cheesy, but it also looks kind of fun. It’s got big, menacing gold eyes with the frowny brow ridges to give it that evil touch; it’s got big crab-like pincers for grabbing gorgeous maidens to gobble; it’s host to these little bat-like things that attach themselves to the back of the neck and control the mind. The bat thingies are great too. I mean, you can only see the wires a couple of times. Three. Well, six at the most. Anyway, the trailers are careful to give you shots of the monster about two inches away from the camera lens – and you find out why in the final scene, when you actually see it in the same shot with a human being and discover that it’s only three feet tall! Yes, it’s as credible as Bill Clinton, as believable as Dr. Gene Scott, as frightening as tapioca. The poster shows this thing looking threateningly in through a window at Peter Graves and it’s as big as a house! How big is it?
It’s about as big as a turkey.
Number Two:
The
Green Slime.
This is a joint Japanese-American production starring Richard
Jaekel and Robert Hutton, both actors known for their work in
westerns and detective thrillers. It’s interesting to note
that this science-fictiony horror film was released in 1969
– the same year 
as 2001: A
Space Odyssey. That this kind of complete
ineptitude can be shoveled onto movie screens in the same year as
a bona fide genre classic proves that the human race makes no
sense. Still, that’s half the fun, isn’t it?
Half the fun of this movie is that it quite happily makes no sense. It’s loaded with things a bad movie should have, and they all work perfectly together to make no sense: stupid story, bad acting, totally unconvincing special effects. The effects are a high point, to be sure. Spaceships rocket through the airless void of space, smoke pouring from their engines – and rising to the top of the soundstage as the ships perform close-camera flybys suspended by piano wire. The most obvious model work this side of the Thunderbirds TV series litters nearly every scene with high-tech tabletop junk. I love really bad models, and I especially love it when they blow up. This is a great movie for exploding models.
All this hardware is almost enough to make you think we’re talking about bad science fiction here, isn’t it? But no, folks, rest assured, as soon as the title creatures hit the stage, you know we’re talking horror flick. We’re talking monsters, and we’re talking monsters in the finest Japanese tradition – guys in green slime suits wandering blindly around the set flailing limp rubber tentacles and attempting to appear threatening. These monster suits are priceless, with one giant eye in the center of the slimy green head and obviously wire-assisted octopus arms. Eek! Run away! Run away! Scary? Nope.
Big fat turkey? Yep. You betcha.
Number Three:
Robot Monster. Poor Phil Tucker, the director of this hilarious turkey, had a nervous breakdown and tried to kill himself after the critics had their way with this when it was released. He can relax and be confident that, now, 45 years later, critics still rave about how bad it is!
There really are no
adjectives that do this baby justice. The absurdity of it can
only be touched on with words: the "Robot Monster,"
actually a guy in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet on top
instead of the gorilla head; the terrible "monster"
voice-over; the strange gestures Ro-Man makes when he speaks
(Darth Vader seems to have borrowed this particular bit of
pantomime – think of him telling Princess Leia she is
"part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor" while
waggling his finger in her face); the rickety wooden table
cluttered with old Army surplus and ham radio equipment –
and, oh, yes, a bubble machine. Now that’s high tech. A
bubble machine.
Stock music, stock footage stolen from at least three other films and acting that is as wooden and static as the camera work … and a script that actually attempts to bring a serious message into this mayhem. Ooh, it’s bad. Tucker claimed that he didn’t think anyone could have made a better movie for the money. So how much money are we talking here?
About five hundred bucks. Now that is a low budget – even in 1953.
Number Four:
Bad Moon. This little treasure is of more recent vintage – without checking, I’m going to say 1997, and I’m not going to check because I’m not paying to rent this again -- and starts Michael Pare and Mariel Hemingway. With a terrifically unoriginal script by Eric Red (who wrote The Hitcher before lapsing into direct-to-video mediocrity), it’s off to a good start before you even take the videotape out of the box. The cover artwork lets you now right away (if the title didn’t tip you off) that it’s a stock, standard, seen-it-all-before-and-Oliver-Reed-did- a-much-better-job-of-it werewolf flick.
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| Mariel Hemingway finds Bad Moon hard to digest... |
There are no surprises here, aside from the surprisingly awful special effects in an era when a few grand’s worth of morphing software can lend professional shimmer to even the cheesiest cheapie. There are a few CGI effects, all of which are thoroughly awful, but most of the werewolf stuff is done with articulated models – yep, the same mechanical/hydraulic remote control beasties pioneered by Rick Baker and Rob Bottin way back in 1979 and 1980 for An American Werewolf in London and The Howling. In this case, the results are hilarious. This werewolf camps it up like an old Fleischer cartoon vet. Its eyes roll wildly around in its sockets, its tongue lolls from its mouth, and even when it’s ripping out the throat of a nosy door-to-door salesman (who, in the EC tradition, richly deserves his fate), it is resolutely un-frightening. Every time I saw it onscreen I thought of that sheep-dog-on-vacation shtick from the Bugs Bunny cartoons: "Which way did he go? Which way did he go? Where’s the little bunny rabbit I saw on TV last week?"
Add to this the usual depth and dimension Michael Pare brings to his roles (i.e. none) and his annoying habit of referring to Mariel Hemingway as "Sis" (yes, she is his sister, but when’s the last time you heard anybody refer to their female sibling as "Sis?" That’s all he ever calls her; you’d think the poor woman didn’t have a name), Mariel herself providing a suitably flat (no pun intended) and uninspiring performance and whammo, before you can say "drivel" you’ve got another one of those big weird-looking birds that are so stupid they drown themselves in rainstorms by looking up at the falling droplets until their lungs are filled with water.
Another turkey, that is.
But there’s always room for one more, and the final nail in the coffin – the final drumstick in this Roman Orgy of awful viewing, as it were:
The Giant Spider Invasion. Oh yes. Just check out this description of the plot, taken from The Internet Movie Database:
A black hole
hits North Wisconsin and opens a door to other dimensions. Giant
15 meter spiders emerge from it, who have an appetite for human
flesh! Dr. Jenny Langer and Dr. Vance from NASA try to save the
world.
Y-y-yeah. Well, what else do you need to know, really?
This film stars Alan Hale. Remember him? He played Skipper on the Gilligan’s Island TV series. Here, he plays second fiddle to a VW bug covered with bearskins and ornamented with fake spider legs on wires. See, this is what they did. The turned the car around backwards, strapped these giant spider legs to it, and then drove it backwards at about 5 miles an hour. Driving it backwards allowed the clever effects technicians to use the taillights for evil, glowing red monster spider eyes.
I’m imagining the meeting they took to brainstorm this dollars-and-nonsense approach to effects technology. I believe Phil Tucker would have approved.
You should definitely save this one for last. You don’t want to watch this immediately after a heavy meal.
And now, since I can never do just exactly what people expect, I’ll give you a little something extra – something I call A Cold Turkey Sandwich for the Week After. You know how there’s always some bird left, right? You end up having turkey soup, turkey and dumplings, turkey sandwiches until you’ve just had so much turkey you never want to see it again. Until next year.
So, until next year, feast your eyes on:
Monster Demolisher. This is an utterly awful Mexican horror cheapie featuring the vampire Nostradamus (I know, I know, don’t even bother – if I try to explain, we’ll be here until Thanksgiving ’99!). Believe it or not, there are three films featuring this guy. See them all if you’re a serious glutton for punishment.
That about wraps it up for another four-day weekend of cinema excess. Are we having fun yet? With Renfield in charge of this bad craziness, just imagine what Christmas is gonna be like!
Great picks, Dave! There's only one more thing...be sure to stock up on antacid before you watch these turkeys after you devour the big turkey--you've been warned! Happy Thanksgiving!
Article copyright Dave Duggins
