ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. - "This Is The Way It Was" (1966)

This week's Wild and Wolley Mammoth Wednesday feature is the most prehistoric film of 1966, 

"One Million Years B.C."

In 1940 they came out with "One Million B.C." and in 1969, they came out with "One Million AC/DC."

In between there was "One Million Years B.C."  

 

Looks pretty prehistoric if you ask me!

Most young men back in 1966 were not interested in seeing a movie about a bunch of sweaty, stinky cavemen, but if a movie was filled with big dinosaurs and hot chicks in furry bikinis, that was a completely different story!

 

And that's why this film stars the beautiful Raquel Welch as cave girl Loana.
 

Born in 1940 as Jo Raquel Tejada, Raquel is still looking great these days at 82 years of age!

For the monsters they brought in the world's foremost stop-action animation artist, Mr. Ray Harryhausen.

"One Million Years B.C." is basically a silent movie, except for a few names called out, and various grunts and moans.

So all Raquel has to really do is look good!

And she is very talented at looking good!

Some of the monsters are okay, but it really doesn't seem like it's Ray Harryhausen's best work!

The bonus, and the only other reason to watch this movie is the appearance of another bombshell beauty, Martine Beswick as Nupondi.

Martine is a Dungeon fave for all of her roles, including another primitive role in "Prehistoric Women" in 1967.

 

Martine was also perfect in the James Bond thriller "Thunderball."

And who could ever forget Martine for her role in "Dr. Jekyll And Sister Hyde?" 

Not me, that's for sure.

Raquel Welch is a gorgeous woman beyond a doubt!

But when it comes to sheer primal audacity, you've just got to go with this gal created by Brian James Riedel for the song by Hermanos Guzanos called

"Cavegirl Love!"

13 CRAPPY HORROR AND SCI-FI MOVIES I LOVE

 What we gots today is 13 of my favorite crappy horror and sci-fi movies from the fifties and sixties. Six of these have been great fodder for the MST guys to chew on, and boy do they! So, grab a cup of coffee for old Tabonga, sit back and enjoy the ride...

Thank you Phil Tucker for putting this one together for TV in 1960, it's pretty cool and I like it a lot. Aliens Hauron and Nadja are fun to watch, his left arm missing with a blood stained sleeve, and their transmission procedure is just weird! Word is... Plastics!

The MST boys have a field day with this Coleman Francis, Tony Cardoza production, wow is it cheap and crappy, but, not without its charm. They just put layers of rubber cement on Tor's face for makeup, plain crappy. They show off Marcia (woo woo) Knight on the poster but she's only in it for a minute, and never sees the Beast! It would have been a much better movie if they filmed her just flopping around for an hour!

Oh my effing Gott!!.. This thing is such a damn mess, but the MST guys hit a home run here, saving the day, one of my favorites! The ending is the most ridiculous POS in the history of film, a Must See!

This one is on the list if for nothing else, for the mind bending séance scene put on by Dr. Acula, with a messed up voice from beyond, that swizzle stick and the pathetic trumpet sounds, holy scheiss! Tor never looked better though, he's all messed up as Lobo the enforcer. I remember seeing a full page promo shot of him in Famous Monsters, he looked creepy and cool.

This movie takes the cake!! That amateur poster there really captures the movie's quality, or lack thereof. It is so whack! The monster is indescribably ridiculous, what a piece of shit, it's slow as Hell too. Just plain amateur hour. MST saves the day again though!

Holy Crap, Holy Crap. Holy Crap!!! This movie is soooooooo BAD!! Larry Buchanan's take on INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN is pathetic. But you can't not watch it to see if that military guy wins that five dollar bet. The nighttime scenes are filmed at like, noon, in actual dark scenes you can see the monsters are are just wearing their head pieces, things just don't match, a total mess! AARGH!! Again, MST does its job, Joel comments on the title card, he says... Who wrote Attack Of The, The Eyes Creatures?!.. Mel Tilllis??

The music alone will make you want to beat your head against a wall. The characters are a mixture of weirdos littered with spider women, male dwarfs, a giant spider, a mad scientist, a psycho and a love triangle! Rifftrax recently got their hands on this one. Love the movie and its madness.

I don't know why I like this one so much, but I do, for me it has a certain charm. Plus it has Him in it, Him likes to look at nudie magazines with pages torn out and hung on the wall. The producers were thrilled when they saw the poster for the movie, but when they finally got to see it, they were flabbergasted by the difference between the fantastic poster and the weak-ass movie!

Eegah and I saw this crazy movie when it came out, and boy did we crack up when they showed the little critters up close! They look like Brillo pads with white pipe cleaners sticking out of them, holy cow! Our band Hermanos Guzanos did a 'musical' version, "Brain Eaters," that can be found on You Tube along with lots of other HG 'tunes' there too.

Man, what can you say about this total bomb that hasn't already been said. It's a hoot to watch as they work their way through the script. Well, maybe I have something to note that hasn't been discussed before about this 3-D disaster... As Ro-Man is walking up one hill in particular, he's tippy-toeing his way up the trail (he looks so damn silly here), looks like he's a little concerned about falling down, or stumbling. seems like he's having trouble seeing what he's doing because of the stupid space helmet!

The madness never stops! This movie is just plain whack, but I love it, it delivers all the low budget monsters, props and effects you'd want for a good laugh. What's really cool is that Bob Crewe (from The Four Seasons) does a number of tunes throughout the film. What I remember most is the super-crappy makeup job on Dr. Nadir's ears, jeez!!

Here's a weird little movie with a David Hewitt tie in, also known as SPACE MONSTER, a TV movie that made it to the theater circuit. The only thing you'll probably remember are those sexy dreams of one of the spaceship crew, and that little alien (with its tongue hanging out) they found in an abandoned ship just floating around in space, but still, I like it.

I saved my favorite crappy movie for last, wow, this thing is surreal... The theme song is great, the cast is great, and it has one of the most interesting movie monster ever conceived. So, what more could you want from a crappy movie?.. Hope you enjoyed.

GRINDSTONE REDUX - "A Documentary About 1980's Cassette Culture" (2009)

Tonight's Saturday Night Special takes us back to the 80's, and though it might have seemed like a sucky time in history to some, I think it was quite a bit better than what we got going on right now!

I'll quote from the back of the box....

"In the 1980's, there was a network of underground musicians, communicating with hand-written letters and cassettes. They were not signed to major labels. They did not get played on commercial radio. But they shared a passion for Independent music. This is their story, as they tell it" 

"Grindstone Redux" was sent to me by Chris Phinney of "Harsh Realisty Music" and is a documentary about the indie 1980's cassette tape revolution that a lot of people still don't realize even happened!

"Grindstone Redux" is mostly a series of interviews all set up by the people getting interviewed, and they were all pieced together to give the viewer a fairly decent taste of what it was all about!

Actually it's modus operandi is very similar in ways to the way we all used to trade tapes back in the day. I say we, because even though I'm not in this documentary, I was pretty entrenched in the whole scene! I thought Randy Greif's name looked familiar to me, but I just looked through all my old notes, and I didn't see his name anywhere. Randy has had a career in music for decades, and you can read all about it at Wikipedia!
For even more, Here's a link to his bandcamp page!

It just shows to go you how big this whole thing was. I sent out well over 500 tapes, and out of the ten prolific artists interviewed for this film, I only ever had contact with four of them.
Charles Goff III was one of them!
Here's a link to Mr. Goff's site called "Taped Rugs."

Don Campau has been an inspiration to us all. He'd do radio shows, tape them, and then send you a copy if he used a song of yours on his show. Besides doing that, he has produced or worked with others on probably close to a zillion tape projects, and I'm not exaggerating!

Don and I have traded lots of tapes over the years!

 Al Margolis actively ran the "Sound Of Pig Music" label from Great Neck, New York.

I have also traded a handful of tapes with Al.
Here's a link to his "If, Bwana" Bandcamp page! 
Bring something to eat, it's going to take a while to explore!

Christopher Elston did his thing as "Curious Voltage." Some of the interviewees made elaborate backgrounds for their parts like this!
This is about all I could find currently on Christopher and Curious Voltage!

Mikhail Bohonus put out sound projects as "WarWorld," "Static Effect," and "They."

I never heard of him or any of his tapes before I watched this.
You can find out a little bit more about Mikhail at this Discogs page.

Ironically I just got an email today from a guy in Lithuania who is going to release an LP of Hermanos Guzanos songs maybe some time this year and he wrote this....

" just randomly i bumped into the discogs user that had mark lanes tapes from you."

I found it kind of odd because I don't remember ever sending any tapes to Mark, but stranger things have happened, no doubt.
You can check out some of his releases here!

Andrew Szava-Kovats is the person responsible for making this cool documentary. This video is modeled after the "Grindstone" series of music compilation tapes put out by Andrew in the 1980s, hence the title "Grindstone Redux."

I never made contact with Andrew either, and I have to reiterate how varied and vast this all was. This video is pretty neat because it explains a lot about what was happening back then from a bunch of different perspectives, all the same, but different!

Here's some stuff from Andrew's True Age site!

This is Chris Phinney of the "Harsh Reality" label that is based in Memphis, Tennessee. Chris and I traded a few tapes back in the 80's and 90's, but we had lost contact until just recently.

His projects have always had wild titles like "Cancerous Growth," "Mental Anguish," "Skoptzies,"(Look It Up) and "Viktimized Karcass!" Don't be fooled by the scary titles, Chris is really a nice guy!
Chris was hit by an uninsured driver last year, and is still in bad need of funds if you've got a couple of bucks to spare. Here's a link to a Gofundme page for Chis with more details!

The last of the artists to be interviewed is Jeff Chenault of "Jeff Central."

  I have never had any contact with Jeff, but he's a very interesting artist and author, and just recently came out with this book called "Ohio Tiki" that is available on Amazon!
I'm thinking I'm going to have to get a copy of that myself, so I know you should too!
 

 

 

Most of the artists interviewed here worked in these three genres of sound, but the common bond of all the tape traders back in the day, whether they were making noise or pop songs was not what they were doing, but how they were doing it!
It was a revolution in sound, and all done with a Do It Yourself attitude!

Other subjects discussed in the video were the huge European Influence. The Germans, The Brits, The French, The Belgians etc. were all way ahead of the curve and doing this sort of thing back in the late 70's and early 80's!

Another subject discussed is "Where were the women?"

It was a fairly male dominant scene, but there were some females out there making their own brand of music too, like Heather Perkins, and Amy Denio!

There's also a great discussion on how self-made music was found, and spread around through various means like Compilation Tapes, Underground Magazines, and College Radio Stations!

There was no internet back then, and you were on your own to try and discover things!

I  think that question has already been answered!

If you'd like to know more about all this, feel free to check my other blog that is all about this subject.

Cassette Culture of the 80's and Beyond!

"Grindstone Redux" is about at an hour long, and should be mandatory viewing in music appreciation classes everywhere, or by anybody who has an interest in a small musical revolution by a ragtag group of totally unorganized people who somehow managed to independently share the things they were doing!
Although it lives on in spirit, it will never happen again, and here's your chance to know a little bit more about it yourself!  
GET YOUR OWN COPY!!