JAPANESE SPIDERMAN - "Dokuro Dan Tai Akuma No Reikyusha" - "Skull Gang Vs. The Devil's Hearse" (1978)

 

This week's Weird Wednesday presentation is the Japanese version of "Spiderman" from 1978, and take my word for it, it doesn't get much weirder than this!

 

Okay, we've already done "The Turkish Spiderman" from 1972!

 

And we've already done "The Italian Spiderman" from 2007, but nothing quite compares to "The Japanese Spiderman" from 1978!

 

First off, you've got a villain named Professor Monster, it's hard to get much cooler than that!

Professor Monster cruises around in a hearse so as not to attract attention! WTF!?

This episode of "Spiderman" was titled "Skull Gang Vs. The Devil's Hearse."

Now that title alone has got to make you wonder!

That's a VERY old pinball machine!

"Japanese Spiderman" has a very large bracelet on his wrist, and these are the inner workings!

 Krazy kids!

This looks pretty straight forward Spiderman!

But because this is "Japanese Spiderman," he's got a big flying robot buddy!

I couldn't figure out why he has a crease in his forehead!

He's still got good Spidey webcrawler skills!

This Spiderman doesn't have any web controllers, and is left with rope swinging or mighty jumps like this to get by!

The action is fast and furious!

The head of the biker gang was turned into a chameleon machine by Professor Monster and is controlled by his hot mess assistant Amazoness!

Spiderman's big buddy makes sure it's a fair fight!

 

The chameleon humanoid monster is defeated, and the world is once again a safe place to live!

That's about as good as it gets!

CALLING DR. DEATH / SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN HIS MINDS "BLACKS OUT"! - 1943

Here's the first Inner Sanctum entry starring Lon Chaney as Dr. Mark Steele, Patricia Morison as Stella Madden, J. Carrol Naish as Inspector Gregg, David Bruce as Robert Duval and Ramsay Ames as Maria Steele. Notice the tagline after the title, that's from the original ad, which even has a grammatical error in it! Cool!

David Hoffman is the spirit of the Inner Sanctum, he warns us about the upcoming sinister murder mystery we are about to experience...

This one had me on the edge of my seat, Dr. Steele has been accused of killing his wife, but things get extra weird as the story evolves, amazing what you can do in a 62 minute movie!

Dr. Steele is home at dinner after a day's work, but what's missing is his derelict wife Maria.

After she shows up at 3 am, Mark and her get into an argument. After Maria crashes on the bed, Mark goes in to strangle her but hasn't the guts to do so...

He knows she's having an affair, and after he finds out that Maria has gone to their cabin at Spring Lake for the weekend, Mark gets in his car and speeds away towards the lake on that Friday. He's so caught up in his thoughts that he's not really paying attention to what he's doing and almost hits the train at a crossing, but skids out into the brush.

Then on Monday morning, Mark wakes up at his office when his secretary and assistant, Stella, shows up for work. Mark looks like Hell and thinks it's Saturday, not Monday. He can't remember anything after the incident with the train. What's cool about this story is we get to hear the characters thinking out loud quite a bit! I really liked that.

But alas, Maria has been brutally murdered, the police show up and take him to the lake to identify the body, and Inspector Gregg (not shown) let's Mark know that he's keeping his eye on him for obvious reasons...

Later, Mark meets with Maria's lover, architect Robert Duval, who has been incarcerated for Maria's murder. Even Mark doesn't believe that Robert murdered her. 

Mark is tortured by the fact that he may have been the one that killed Maria because of his lapse of memory and the frame of mind he was in. Again, we get to hear his anguished thoughts.

Okay, here's the thing... Mark is a doctor who uses hypnosis to help cure his patients, in this case, he allows Stella to hypnotize him and ask him questions as to what happened during his memory lapse. She agrees and records his answers on a small record

Inspector Gregg pops in and Stella plays the recording to prove Mark's innocence, and after it plays a bit, Gregg tells her to turn it off. He tells Stella that it doesn't prove anything.

The Inspector asks Mark for some matches to light his cigarette and notices from the cover that it's from Spring Lake, not cool.

Robert is set to die in an electric chair at 6 am in the morning, seemingly depressed by the situation, Mark and Stella decide to go to the movies to get their mind off their troubles. But why did they go to see a comedy, everyone's laughing except them. And after a failed dinner, they decide to just go hang out at the office...

With only an hour to go before Robert is to be executed, Stella is nodding off so Mark has her sit in the hypno chair. He immediately hypnotizes her and starts asking her a few questions...

Stella has no choice but to tell the truth now! 

She spills the beans, her and Maria were both after Mark's money, and Robert was broke and looking to go with either lady that got to the money... The walls were closing in on her!

Oh yeah, she killed Maria with a fireplace poker over the dough!

And, when Mark was hypnotized, she just basically told him what to say before she recorded that segment without her question/statement.

While hypnotized, we see poor Robert walk up to the camera where he faints and drops down, but when the guards pull him up, it's freaking her!!

Low and behold, Inspector Gregg had been there the whole time! And when Stella backs out of the room, two big cops are waiting there to take her away!! The Inspector calls the governor and Robert is saved from the chair. Also, he tells Mark that he was never a suspect, just thought he could help direct him to the murderer. This one's a gem!!

JAMES BATMAN - "Bistek Tagalog" (1966)

This Saturday Night Special is just that! If you're a fan of the ridiculous, the absurd, and/or the insane, well then this is definitely a movie made to order for you!

"James Batman" is such a blatant rip-off, you could never make a film like this these days, and I'm actually surprised it's not completely banned by everybody! But it's not, so welcome back to what's cookin' tonight in The Dungeon! Sweet, Salty, and Sour!

You want some pancit with that adobo?

 

This crazy cat named Dolphy plays both a Batman character, and a James Bond character! Mr. Dolphy had 266 acting credits to his name, and parodied everybody from Dracula to Tarazan at one time or another. He also made a handful of movies where he played a character named Agent 1-2-3.

 

That's the whole story in a nutshell, that and the world has five days to meet The CLAW's demands or everything will be destroyed! 

CHEERS!

 

Before Batman and Robin can go to work, they scarf down a bunch of what looks like some kind of tapsilog breakfast treat.
 

As you can obviously see, Batman has got some very sophisticated high tech equipment!

James Batman and James Hika are not really on close terms, but they decided to put their differences aside so they can save the world!

The swank Batmobile is a converted old Cadillac, which looks to me to be a 1959.

There's plenty of action in this film, in fact, there's too much! "James Batman" runs a little over an hour and a half, and if it were cut down to about thirty minutes, it would probably be a pretty good movie. There's also a whole lot of non-action that could be cut out that wouldn't be much of a loss!

Although "James Batman" is largely an action/adventure movie, it is also undoubtedly a comedy!

One weird twist, in this film, Batman and Robin are brothers. Robin was played by a guy named Boy Alano. Boy has an amazing 144 credits of his own in films like "Papa Um Mamaw," and "Sandwich Shindig."

I just can't help but think that the blanket on the bed and on the wall, are made of the same fabric as James's suit!

They bring this CLAW girl in, and she hypnotizes the whole room full of guys with her body! In fact, the one guy there is so not paying attention that he sticks his cigarette in his nose of instead of his mouth!

Outlandish as it may seem, they even have a Penguin character!

This gang of Filipino guys is ready to rumble!

James finds a very unlikely place to hide from The Penguin.

I felt exactly the same way for the major portion of this film!

Now this VW van ambulance is pretty cool!

 

The CLAW is gonna get you, one way or another! No, that's not Debra Harry, but this is!

Then this guy Jimmy or Johnny or whatever his name is, shows up, and helps the guys defeat the CLAW.

Batman is so sneaky!

"James Batman" should not get mixed up with "TheTurkish Batman." It's easy to do since they are both equally insane. Boy, what a double feature that would be!

I did a little trolling around and found out that "James Batman" now plays freely on YouTube, so gather all your batty friends together, have a grand olde time, and figure it all out for yourself, because it makes about as much sense as anything else these days!