frankenstein meets the space monster Tagged Articles at Cinematical

NASA's Phoenix lander has its rendezvous with Mars, and that, as well as the upcoming Puerto Rican primary, gives a torn-from-today's-weblogs quality to this purported horror film, aka'd both as Mars Attacks Puerto Rico and Mars Invades Puerto Rico. But Frankenstein Meets The Space Monster is a film for all seasons anyway. Lou Cutell's alienating Doctor Nadir (above) in bald wig, goblin ears, and loads of clown white makeup, isn't even the most uncanny part of this particularly inexpensive sci-fi epic, which pits a disfigured robot Frankenstein against the gorilla-suited, skull-headed Mull: a sort of an alien attack dog.

Made by Robert Gaffney, a long-time second-unit director for Kubrick (this piece from dvdtalk.com considers Gaffney's career), FMTSM is a good-looking li'l crapburger. It's remembered fondly for Mull, and the hoity-toity aliens who keep him on a leash. Recently at the Super-Con in San Jose, I saw two separate TV horror hosts on a panel endorsing FMTSM as their favorite bad film. Could it give Plan Nine From Outer Space a run for its money? Hard to say, but it shares four essential qualities of Plan Nine; four things that may be completely necessary to the making of a memorable turkey. You've heard it said that it's as hard to make a bad movie as it is to make a good one. Fair enough: there are plenty of filmmakers out there who want to work hard making a bad movie.

The Library of Congress' National Film Registry isn't the only place working to preserve the world's films, and Martin Scorsese isn't the only one concerned with keeping film prints of lost classics handy. According to a new story in the Guardian, there exists an entire subculture of devoted souls who scrounge, scavenge and otherwise dig up all kinds of rare and forgotten films.

The ultimate film scavenger story is the one about the man who found an complete print of Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) in the broom closet of a sanitarium. Though modern-day collectors can't hope for a find of that magnitude, they can at least be proud of the forgotten gems that they have launched back into circulation. Many of today's finds come from videotapes of old television broadcasts. Otto Preminger's notorious Skidoo (1968) -- with images of Groucho Marx toking up -- for example, has been unavailable for years, and now it can be had from Don Hicks' Subterranean Cinema.