HOT CARS - Les Baxter - "Sucker Bait" (1956)

Normally when you see the words "Hot Cars," you think of souped-up hot rods and hot chicks, and that's sure what this poster looks like, but No, that's not it! Welcome back to Weird-Ass Wednesday outside in the parking lot of The Dungeon, and tonight's red light special.........

"HOT CARS"

"Hot Cars" is a truly unique movie about used car lots selling stolen cars, or literally, "Hot Cars!"

To make it look legit, they used real car lots, and gave them credit at the end! Robert(Invasion Of The Body Snatchers) Osterloh is the owner of this lot, Big John!

Now isn't this iconic America circa 1956? Handsome John(Revenge Of The Creature, Curucu, Beast Of The Amazon) Bromfield as the recently fired used car salesman, Nick Dunn, and his dear lovely stay-at-home wife Jane, as played by Carol Shannon. I don't know why, but Carol looks very familiar to me although she was only in 5 TV shows besides this movie. I must have seen them all!! Nick and Jane have a sick baby boy named Davy who is always off camera! I guess that's how they saved the money up to finance the big climax!

Bow House!

For some, the number one blonde bombshell of the 1950's and 60's was Joyce Renee Brown, aka Joi Lansing! Sometimes it's hard not to agree! Here's some creds: "Touch Of Evil," "Atomic Submarine," and "Hillbillies In A Haunted House!"

You might not know his name until now, but with 310 acting credits, Dabbs Greer as the snoopy Detective Davenport, has a face you will recognize if you've ever watched anything on TV from 1950 to 2003!

Joi Lansing died from breast cancer at the very young age of 43, but she still outlived both Marilyn Monroe (36) and Jayne Mansfield (34) by almost a decade! Besides her movie roles, some of her TV roles are forever too, like Shirley Swanson on "The Bob Cummings Show," and Gladys Flatt on "The Beverly Hillbillies!"

Nick Dunn just needs a shoulder to cry on, and Joi's character Karen Winter seems overly available!

Nick doesn't realize yet that Karen is the best girl of the crook who hired him! He's about to get set up to take a fall, but he doesn't have a clue! Sucker bait is right!

That claw of Karen Winter's might as well be around Nick's throat!

Detective Davenport has been murdered, and all the evidence points to Nick, but Oh, Yeah, he has an excuse, and his wife doesn't even care if he was with another woman as long as it means that he didn't kill anybody, so he admits that he was at Karen Winter's apartment! I like the way this shot is set up!

Another great shot shows the Detective questioning Miss Winter who denies she even knows Nick Dunn! Nick tells them he can identify the furnishings in the bedroom without going in there, but everything has been changed, and he looks like a dunce!

The music in the hot theme and throughout this film is by one of the Dungeon Super Faves, the phenomenal Les Baxter! You like horror movies, you like 60's surf movies, then Les Baxter is THE man!! Here are just the movies that Les composed for in the random year of 1963 : THE YOUNG RACERS, THE RAVEN, THE EVIL EYE, A BOY TEN FEET TALL, OPERATION BIKINI, X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES, BEACH PARTY, BLACK SABBATH, SAMSON AND THE SLAVE QUEEN, I TABÙ, and THE COMEDY OF TERRORS!

I would imagine that cinematographer William Marguiles gets credit for stuffing a camera inside the dashboard! Mark(The Pharaoh's Curse)Dana is tough guy Smiley Ward! Both Mark Dana and Joi Lansing were also in the 43rd of 48 Bowery Boys movies made also in 1956, called ironically "Hot Shots!"

Great cast, great music, but what makes this movie truly unique and historically significant is that it ends up in Santa Monica at magnificent Pacific Ocean Park!

The Sea Serpent Roller Coaster is the stage for what is in my humble opinion the best fight scene I've ever seen on a roller coaster!

You would think they would have had to use green screen to get shots that look this good, but as far as I could tell, it's all live action footage!

Freakin' Smiley gets what's coming to him!

I found "Hot Cars" streaming on Amazon Prime, and you can too! It's compact at just over an hour long, and a roller coaster ride that's well worth taking!

THE BLOB / TriStar Pictures - 1988

It's time to check out this thing produced by Jack H. Harris, the guy responsible for all the BLOB flicks. When my dad took me to see the original THE BLOB in 1958 when I was just 10 years old, it messed my brain up more than any other movie I had ever seen, and, I got to see 67 horror/sci-fi movies at the theater from 1953-59. One note about this 1988 version, I was working at an art supply store in the San Fernando Valley and some gophers came in and bought out all our black tempera paint, they needed it to darken the sewer water for that scene. They returned all the paint a few days later and said it wasn't needed, the water was already dirty enough!!

Here's a little sound clip from this wild flick, sooooo, you can push the big red 'GO' button located there by our Atomic Gob, NOW, Ralphie The Tarantula!.. Here's... THE BLOB!

Kevin Dillon is Brian Flagg (Cash's Bro?), he's a bad boy, all the local jocks hate him.

Keeping with the original story, this old coot watches as a meteorite swoops in and crashes near his homemade living quarters adorned with hub caps!

Of course, he has to go over and check it out. He uses a stick to poke the substance inside the rock from space and it latches itself onto it. Hmmm... Wonder what happens next?

Anyway, later at the hospital, that nut-brained Blob is playing havoc on the old guy's innards!

As heard in the sound clip, this oversexed jock has big plans for him and his date. Instead of getting to first base though, he purchases a one-way ticket straight to HELL!!!

This scene at the restaurant is shocking, the cook has just prepared his last meal. Now it's time for him to become a tasty treat for the mean old Blob!

And, it doesn't end there, it shoots out of the drain and attacks the other people present!

This is what happens to the projectionist at the theater. Pretty weird, huh?!

Had to show this still of the head scientist trying to track down the insidious horror.

We get to see the marquee of the midnight horror show like in the 1958 version. Then, we get a frightful glance of the giant thing as it clears the aisles in the theater!!

Come back Wednesday when we'll have even more Dungeon Reviews just for you!!

LA PEAU DE TORPEDO - François de Roubaix - "Only The Cool" (1970)

 It's another Saturday night down in The Dungeon, and I ain't got nobody but you and this weird ass flick! I watch a lot of strange and odd movies, and this one is right up there with the best, so get Ready, Set, and here we GO................!!!!

 It's "La Peau De Torpedo," No, it's "Torpedoes Skin," No, It's "The Children Of Mata Hari," No, it's "Pill Of Death," No, it's "The Deathmakers," No, it's "Only The Cool!"

Nothing like a little bit of gratuitous sex to get things going! The music in this film is very cool throughout! Here's the theme and a little more created by Maestro François de Roubaix of "Le Samouraï" fame! When he wrote the music for "The Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay," François used the name Cisco El Rubio! I don't know why, but I find that interesting!

This movie is so ambiguous in so many twisted ways! I'm going to guess at the times and just tell you what it felt like to me! It starts off with this spy guy going to sneak into some place and steal some secret documents! You don't know who he is, or why he's doing it, or whether he's a good guy or a bad guy! The actor is Frédéric de Pasquale!

To me, this went on for about 15 minutes! He finally reaches his destination, and takes some secret photos with a secret camera!

What this guys is up to is so secret, his wife, the lovely Stéphane(The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie)Audran as Dominique, can't even know about it, so she just thinks he's being unfaithful to her! On his latest job, there was a malfunction at the junction, so he has to be squirreled off to a secret destination! Unfortunately, the sneaky spies get spotted by Dominique's best girlfriend as played by Noëlle(Wild For Kicks)Adam who spills the beans, and tells her that she saw her husband with another woman in Paris! How freakin' ironic! These people are all up to some over the top secret affairs, and they get busted up by some daytime soap opera script!

Dominique goes to the address her girlfriend gives her to confront her husband, and ends up shooting him dead, and the agent who was housing him that she thought was his girlfriend! So, I'm confused right away, I thought he was the star of the movie! The female agent is Catherine(Poof)Jacobsen as La 'boîte aux lettres' or 'The Mailbox!'

Lilli (Chamber Of Horrors, The House That Screamed) Palmer as Hélène is the Boss of the whole operation! She is cold and calculating just like Dr. Joyce Brothers or Hillary Clinton! So now it's time for this different agent(or is it the same actor, I can't tell?)to go clean up the mess, and silence anybody who might leak anything to anybody! He's happy to do it! She gives him a hard shelled pill full of instant death to put in his mouth and bite if and when it comes down to it!

AAAhhhh!! What's this? The Island of Dr. Moreau? No, it's just a little girl sticking her face up against the side of one of those things that don't exist anymore, a phone booth!

'The Mailbox' didn't die in the shooting, so one of the nurses (they seem to have agents virtually everywhere) gives her a snoot of some stuff that kills her instantly, just in case she recovered and might talk to somebody! These people seem to have some major issues about information leaking out!!

In the meantime, Dominique ran off into the night after the shooting, and ends up on this anti-establishment guy's boat! This crooner is Angelo(Secret Agent Super Dragon)Infanti! He serenades Dominique with this sweet song he wrote! "I don't like buildings, I don't like the subway, I don't like week days, I don't like the office, I only like luxury hotels, I only like dough, I only like Sundays, I only like mink, I only like cars, I only like caviar, I only like stars, I only like jaguars......" etc.

I had to include this shot, because it reflected the way I felt watching this movie a lot of the time!

Obviously, some of this is tongue in cheek! If the sub-titles look a little funky, I think it's whoever did it, didn't quite have a handle on the English language! Doesn't matter though, the end result is the same!

The local authorities have been monitoring the whole scene! I love these two shots, and the juxtaposition between the cops in private drinking beer and chowing, versus on the street, looking all official!

The last guy bites the pill, and the dust after another 15 minutes of chase, so now it's the always interesting Klaus Kinski's turn as Torpédo I ! The Boss lady Hélène doesn't know what to make of Klaus's character! He's a bit too loose for this organization (so he must be REALLY good)!!

Dominique remains on the boat, but they have figured out where she is! Everybody wants to kill everybody else, because nobody knows that nobody else doesn't even know anything!

The guy who owns the boat who was singing the song seems like he's a character that matters, but once Klaus boards the boat, he unceremoniously kills him too!

Klaus pursues Dominique, but falls through a big hole and breaks his back! He's failed, so he wants to die, and the authorities don't mind if he does, because they don't need him any more since they caught his Boss lady!

Someone even higher up decides that they need to make sure that the Boss doesn't talk either, and Dominique, who still doesn't know anything, gets taken in by the authorities!

What you do now, and where you go from here is all up to you!