Tonight's Saturday Halloween Countdown special is one of the last of the real 50's classics we haven't covered yet! It's called "CURUCU, Beast Of The Amazon," and it was written and directed by Curt Siodmak! When you consider some of Curt's other work like "Donovan's Brain," "I Walked With A Zombie," or "The Wolfman," it's pretty weak by comparison, but still a classic nonetheless!
No secrets here, the monster ain't that great so they show it to you right out of the box!! It looks kinda like a cross between a platypus, and a giant magpie on steroids!
AAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!
Those giant claws are lethal, and John (REVENGE OF THE CREATURE) Bromfield as Rock Dean and Tom (LOVE SLAVES OF THE AMAZONS) Payne as Tupanico are just as confused by all the deaths as the police are! What John really has on his mind is he wants to have a cigarette, and Tupanico has got a bit of a chip on his shoulder because he doesn't like being played by a white guy!
Ah, the good olde days when you could still smoke in the Doctor's office while getting a shot!
Rock Dean asks The Doctor played by the wonderful Beverly Garland out for dinner, and smokes a couple more cigarettes while he's at it!
Hubba, hubba!! Vivian, the dancer in the club, and one of Rock's old flames of course, is played by Larri Thomas! Larri has been a dancer of some sort in at least 13 of her 37 roles! The
music you'll hear from the club scene was written by Raoul Kraushaar, a man you've read about here many times before for his work on films like "Invaders from Mars," "Billy The Kid vs. Dracula," and "Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter!" Raoul had many non-horror credits too, like "Highway 13," and sometimes worked as Ralph Kraushaar or Ralph Stanley!
Not to be outdone, Larri has a smoke on her break while she explains to Bev that after smoking cigarettes, Rock's favourite pastime is sex!!
Tupanico is Rock's trustworthy guide who is going to lead him out into the jungle where he can smoke to his heart's content! He even helps Rock out by giving him a light!
The Doctor wants to go too, but Rock says no!! Of course she ends up going along anyway, otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story at all!
Curucu strikes again!!
Rock thinks you shoot a rifle the same way you smoke a cigarette, but Tupanico straightens him out!
There's lots more scary things out in the jungle too!
Not green screen, "CURUCU, The Beast Of The Amazon" was actually shot on location in Argentina and Brazil!
Well, as fate would have it, the monster is fake, and Tupanico is behind the whole thing, committing the murders to prevent further colonization of the native lands!
Rock and the Doctor manage to escape, and when she wakes up, she is safe and sound again!
Rock puts the make on the Doctor, and this time she goes along with his advances, having lived through a series of harrowing adventures! A native whose life the Doctor saved brings them a token of his appreciation!
And just what was in the basket? That lousy rotten bastard Tupanico's stinkin' shrunken head! What a happy ending!
4 comments:
I'm curious. You made no mention that your CURUCU pics are in black and white. IMDB says it was filmed in Eastman Color and I recently saw the episode of NIGHT GALLERY, "Lagoda's Head" that had COLOR clips of CURUCU incorporated into it. (After the fact- several NG eps had oddball Universal clips added to pad the running time.) I'm guessing your source was a fuzzy TV print that was made in b&w???
Questions?/Comments? * This Has Been e-mail From:
"Dr. Mark" Hill * The Doctor Of Pop Culture /*/ drmark7@juno.com
You know what Doc, I have no idea, I really wasn't paying attention, but Yes, even the poster says it was shot in Eastman Color! I had a hard enough time just finding this copy, and didn't think about it much past that!
Saw it with my dad in '56, a color film for sure - looks like this print is from a b/w TV broadcast.
The footage of curucu in the night gallery episode, I found myself saying ,those aren't african natives, they're Amazonian indians.
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