Ryan Watches 50 Movies

Today's movie is Nightmare Castle , which IMDb tells me is also known as Night of the Doomed , Lovers from Beyond the Tomb , The Faceless Monster , and Gli Amanti d'oletretomba . Which title is your favorite? This is another Italian film, but this one is marginally better than Atom Age Vampire . Maybe. This is also Movie #2 of Side B of Disc 1, which means I'm finished with the first disc of the 12-disc set! Wooo! Synopsis Stephen Arrowsmith (cool name!) is a mad scientist who lives in a big, spooky castle (Is there any other kind?) with his hot wife Muriel. She's having an affair with their beefy gardener David, and when Stephen catches them he chains them up and tortures them... whipping, cutting, dripping of acid on the face, that kind of thing. Through all this, Muriel spews venom at him: Boy, do I hate you, she says. You're really a big fat jerk. Go ahead and kill me, jerk... You think you'll get my inheritance? Well, you're wrong, Mr. Jerkface, because...

Today’s movie is Creature from the Haunted Sea from 1961. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was directed by Roger Corman, the prolific B-movie movie master who cranked out over 572,000 films in the 1960s, including the original Little Shop of Horrors . I will not be shocked if there’s some more Corman later in this DVD set. If you’re familiar with Corman’s style, you know that his “horror” movies were very tongue-in-cheek, and Creature is no exception. In fact, Wikipedia's article classifies the film as a comedy. I guess there's no 50-movie set of comedies, so here it is. Synopsis Our hero and narrator is an American secret agent named XK-150, who’s posing as a crooked businessman in order to infiltrate a crew led by a crime boss named Renzo Capetto. Renzo is helping some counter-revolutionary Cubans (remember, this is 1961) smuggle a trunk full of gold out of the country and across the ocean. This is explained in forest-set scene that appears to have been...

Ah, the atomic age. It's the era in which personal jetpacks, plastic houses full of plastic furniture, and nuclear-powered electric toothbrushes became a reality. However, none of those things appear in today's classic horror movie, 1960's Atom Age Vampire , which was directed by Anton Giulo Majano and stars Alberto Lupo and Susanne Loret. Instead, it's an Italian film (original title: Seddok, l'erede di Satana ) dubbed into English, about a mad scientist and his unrequited love, and there's not even a real vampire in it. No vampire?! That's like if Fried Green Tomatoes didn't feature any tomatoes, or if Seven Brides for Seven Brothers only had six brides for seven brothers! Synopsis In a strange coincidence(?), this movie begins with the female lead running her car off the road, just like in the last movie I watched , but this one results in a fiery crash rather than submersion. After her accident, Jeanette (who seems to be some kind of dancer by tra...

So here I am, watching all the films in the 50 Movie Pack: Horror Classics DVD set. Click here to read the introductory post, in which I explain why. The first film on the first side of the first disc of 50 Horror Classics is 1962's Carnival of Souls , starring Candace Hilligoss. After you read this post, you should check out the Wikipedia article I just linked to; it actually has a lot of interesting information on the film. I had never heard of this movie, but the fact that it was co-written, directed and produced by a man named "Herk Harvey" prepared me for a so-fun-'cause-it's-so-bad romp, as did the opening scene with its obvious and flawed dialogue looping. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start with the... Synopsis Three young women agree to a street race against a dumb-looking guy in a dumb-looking hat. Whee, fun! But their car smashes through a guardrail and plunges into the river below. Boo, not fun! Rescue crews are unable to locate th...

I got a lot of cool stuff for Christmas 2007, including one unexpected gift from Dad. It's a set of DVDs called 50 Movie Pack: Drive-In Movie Classics , and as the title suggests, it contains 50 movies one might expect to see at a drive-in theater in days of old -- "classic" b-movies from decades past, such as Day of the Panther, TNT Jackson, and of course that favorite I Wonder Who’s Killing Her Now? As unusual as this is, it’s not without precedent. Last Christmas, Dad gave me another 50 Movie Pack, this one containing 50 Horror Classics on 12 discs (which sounds like something from the “greatest hits” game on Whose Line Is It Anyway? – “Order now and we’ll send you 73 lumberjack songs on 58 CDs!”). But the truth is, I never got around to watching the horror movies. If I don’t finish them, I’ll never get around to watching the drive-in movies, and what kind of display of gratitude would that be for my father’s thoughtful gift? So I’m going to watch all 5...