Microreview [film]: The Last Woman on Earth (1960)

This movie is hot garbage

The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price (1964) follows the lone survivor of a global plague, as he does resourceful things to survive, fight off hordes of zombie vampires, and try to work out a cure to the plague that might allow others to live. He's pretty active.

By contrast, The Last Woman on Earth is about two jerks who fight over Evelyn (get it? "Eve"?), one of the jerks' wife, while asking her to make breakfast and coffee, and she reads books about having a baby. I kept waiting for her to realize that these guys are dipshits and come into her own — and at one point she even said something along those lines — but Friends, I waited in vain. I fell asleep with five minutes left in the movie, while the two jerks were duking it out over "possession" of The Last Woman on Earth, and when I woke up, I rewound the movie to actually see the last five minutes, watching for the moment where Evelyn steps out and tells them both to go to Hell. Friends, I rewound in vain.

This movie was written by Robert Towne! Academy Award-winning writer of Chinatown! Astute readers of this site will know that I am a huge Roger Corman fan, and though this film was produced and directed by Roger, there is literally nothing I can recommend about this movie.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 3/10

Bonuses: What's the mathematical equivalent of blowing a raspberry at the screen?

Penalties: -1 for there being entirely too goddamn many dudes in a movie called The Last Woman on Earth, -1 for literally everything else in the movie

Cult Film Coefficient: 1/10. Really, really bad.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012.

Microreview [film]: 4D Man

Pseudoscience be damned, this is a 50s B-movie worth seeking out

This one's pretty fun.

After the breakout success of The Blob, producer Jack Harris and director Irvin Yeaworth teamed up again the following year for 4D Man. In it, young scientist Tony Nelson is kind of a screw-up, and starts the film by accidentally burning down the whole building his borrowed lab is in while trying to ram a pencil through a block of steel. You know, like you do. Meanwhile, Tony's successful older brother Scott is developing a material even stronger than steel for possible military applications, with the help of scientist Linda Davis (a pre-Batman Lee Meriwether), upon who he's crushing pretty hard. You see where this is all going right?

So now Tony's out of a job, and goes to see his big brother just as Scott perfects his impenetrable metal, which is a huge success for the company he works for. Scott, though, becomes nearly enraged when the head of the company can't even remember his name at the press conference announcing the metal. Poor Scott. Linda's already falling in love with younger, more virile Tony (who's way more into penetrating things), who lets Scott in on his secret ambition to pass one material through another using "amplified brain waves." It's no fun inventing an impenetrable material when your little brother wants to show you can just stick a pencil through it by thinking really hard. But little does anyone know that older brother Scott's brain waves have been permanently altered by his experiments — altered in such a way that allow him to pass through any object using only the power of...his mind! (dun-dun-dun)

There's actually a neat idea at the center of 4D Man, and that idea is change over time, based very, very loosely on the idea of solid-state diffusion. The (totally, totally flawed but, hey, pretty fun!) premise is that given enough time, two objects will sort of melt into each other. In real life, this is true of things like pitch dropping but that may be about all. Nevertheless! Scott discovers that he can pass his body through any material — mailboxes, bank vaults, slutty girls at bars, that kind of thing — but it takes a tremendous temporal toll on him, making him age rapidly. Lucky for him, he also accidentally discovers that by touching other humans — like the aforementioned heavy drinker in a low-cut dress — he can suck the life out of them and replenish his own...it's not clear, exactly. Life force, maybe? What follows is your basic The Invisible Man or The Man With the X-Ray Eyes sort of descent into madness, in which longtime TV actor Robert Lansing does quite a nice job, especially when confronting Lee Meriwether's Dr. Linda Davis.

Stylistically, this movie reminded me a lot of Gog, which I thoroughly enjoyed. 4D Man is less socially aware than that film was, but it does a surprisingly credible job of telling a human story about two brothers who are each a little jealous of the other for different reasons...and the unfortunate and terrible cost of that rivalry when really, really strong brain-waves get involved.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for Lee Meriwether's character being a scientist (a scientist who's maybe a little too eager to help the guys type stuff up, but a female scientist onscreen in the 1950s, nonetheless), +1 for stronger character development and acting than most of its filmic peers

Penalties: -1 for some quite disjointed sequences, like a bizarre cameo from Patty Duke as a little girl who appears to be headed to a Frankenstein-style fate, but then simply disappears from the movie, never to be mentioned again.

Cult Film Coefficient: 7/10, which is actually a little better than you may be thinking.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since before the pitch last dropped.

Alert! Cult Movie Titles Expiring from Netflix

Just a heads-up for those of you who subscribe to Netflix Instant: This Wednesday, May 1, hundreds of titles are expiring and will no longer be available to view instantly. These include a ton of 1950s sci-fi and classic horror titles (many of which I've reviewed here at Nerds of a Feather).

Some of these titles include:

• Gog
• Invisible Invaders
• Burn, Witch, Burn
• The Call of Cthulhu (independent silent film from 2005)
• Beyond the Time Barrier
• Dr. Phibes Rises Again (campy Vincent Price classic)
• The Flight that Disappeared
• The Black Sleep
• The Dunwich Horror (loosely based on the Lovecraft story)
• Red Planet Mars
• The Crimson Cult (Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee)
• I Bury the Living (one of my favorite b-horror movies)
• The Brain that Wouldn't Die

So stock up on Mountain Dew or Starbucks gift cards and start watching, folks. We're less than 24 hours away from B-moviemageddon!

Microreview [film]: Invisible Invaders

The Meat:

If you could distill 50s sci-fi B-movies down to their most basic and lovable essence, the hooch you'd be cooking in your bathtub would look a lot like Invisible Invaders. From nuclear accidents to menacing aliens standing in for Communists, from poor effects and the rampant exploitation of stock footage, and from Army brass that just doesn't get it to zombies to John Carradine, this movie's got everything but Ray Harryhausen stop-motion.

After a noted scientist (Carradine) blows himself up during an atomic experiment, one of his colleagues, a Dr. Penner, goes to an Army general to plead that the atomic program be used only for peace, but to no avail. Then, the night of Carradine's funeral, the filmmakers introduce the only practical effect they were able to accomplish -- dirt moving by itself in mimicry of two shuffling, shambling invisible feet. The shuffle-tracks lead to Carradine's fresh grave, and suddenly, the blown-up doctor's totally unmarked corpse shows up at Penner's house, the reanimated puppet of invisible aliens who will be taking over the earth in 24 hours. But when Penner doesn't manage to secure a global surrender in the time allotted, the aliens take matters into their own hands by reanimating a crash victim and sending him into the PA booth during a local ice hockey game to frighten all the Earthlings. Because the producers had stock footage of a hockey game.

This hockey-based warning proves ineffective, though (they should've tried throwing octopi on the ice), so the aliens go ahead and attack, an event which is narrated to coincide with other available stock footage, including that of WWII bombings, factory fires, and the planned demolition of tenement buildings. The aliens then reanimate the dead (yes! zombies!), who walk over a hill in a group of about ten. A tough-but-fair Army guard grabs Dr. Penner, his daughter, and her odd little fiance, and whisks them off to an underground science bunker designed to withstand atomic war. The zombies then walk over the hill again. Dr. Penner, et al, begin working out theories for how to stop the zombies and/or aliens, which really isn't that interesting. But the zombies walk over the hill again, and our intrepid team of humanity's last hope is worried they'll soon find their way into the science bunker. Which was designed to survive nuclear war. Whatever, whatever, the zombies walk over the hill again, good guys win, and in closing we are told that the moral of the story is that all the nations of Earth can work together. Because the producers had some stock footage of the United Nations.

I had fun with this one. You can catch it on Netflix Instant or YouTube.

The Math

Objective Quality: 4/10

Bonuses: +1 for the aliens using what appears to be Plan 9.5 from Outer Space; +1 for the hilariously obvious and rarely appropriate use of stock footage; +1 for the shambling, invisible feet that just shove dirt up in front of them over, and over, and over again; +1 for changing the definition of "shooting a man in cold blood" to mean "shooting a guy who's currently trying to kill you with a shotgun"

Penalties: -1 for the odd little fiance's brief bout with total insanity, before a punch in the jaw fixes him right up

Cult Movie Coefficient: 7/10. A mostly enjoyable experience.

[See explanation of our non-inflated scores here.]

Microreview [film]: Casa de mi Padre

The Meat

Casa de mi Padre is satire of/loving homage to Mexican B-movies, starring Will Ferrell,
Gael García Bernal, Ron Swanson, Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite, Diego Luna and Genesis Rodriguez, who I'd imagine is about to become a superstar. Oh, and did I mention that Will Ferrell does the whole thing in Spanish? And not terrible Spanish either. But I digress...

The plot of Casa de mi Padre is standard action/melodrama: brother of hero comes home to the ranch with hot girlfriend, brother turns out to be bad news, hot girlfriend not-so-secretly falls in love with hero, brother gets in trouble with very bad dude who lives nearby, hot girlfriend somehow mixed up in everything, hero has to save the day, hero does save the day. You've seen this movie before, or at least something not too different from it. It may not have come from Mexico, but from India, the United States, Turkey or Indonesia, but trust me--if you've seen B-movies, you know this plot.  

Casa de mi Padre thus is a bit of a one trick pony, and could have been really painful, but thankfully the filmmakers opted not to take a Zucker Brothers gag-a-minute approach. Instead, Ferrell, Bernal, Luna, Rodriguez and the others play it straight, letting the laughs come from the incredibly fake looking sets and props, gratuitous overacting and I-literally-just-cut-the-film-with-a-butter-knife style editing. There are some genuinely funny moments, like this one:

And Offerman/Swanson, playing a corrupt DEA agent who speaks perfect Spanish but with the most cringe-worthy American accent you can imagine, is a certified scene stealer. In the end, though, the film is neither brilliant nor really even aiming for that. Instead, it's a quieter type of spoof film: perfect to catch midway through on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but not exactly something you'd run out and get the Blu-ray special edition of.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 5/10

Bonuses: +1 for taking the more subtle approach to spoofing; +1 for Nick Offerman, who is awesome; +1 for the rest of the stellar cast, who all look like they were having a blast making this film.

Penalties: -1 for just not being that good, at the end of the day.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10. "An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws."

Read about our Pitchfork-inspired, non-inflated grading system here.