Saturday, February 25, 2012

PROJECT X - Van Cleave - "Organ By Lowrey" (1968)

So here's the final installment of our quasi-tribute to Bill Castle, and would you be able to guess? Yes, it's an odd one, and just to prove, that just like William Castle, we can never be trusted, here's just a touch of what you will find inside this box of eye candy! I had this already done, and it was too cool to leave behind, here's "PROJECT X"!

Here's some information I find particularly interesting, The first film made with the title "Project X" was in 1949, and it was about a guy getting blackmailed into stealing a secret atomic energy plan, then there is William Castle's title in 1968, a film about the future, and keeping secrets from The Chinese, next, there was a film called "Project X" that was released in 1987 about Matthew Broderick and some monkeys, and finally there was a "Project X" released this year that is about an out of control high school party! My how things degrade over time!

The year is 2018, but I swear I heard them say it was 150 years in the future! The guy in the tube is THE Hagen Arnold, the rest of them are a bunch of military men and scientists that don't know how to dress worth a crap! Throw away your sun glasses, the future ain't looking that bright for fashion! The small cast is fleshed out by Sheila (The Busy Body) Bartold, Phillip (Lost Missile, Phantom From 10,000 Leagues) Pine, Harold (Freaky Friday) Gould, Ivan (General Hospital) Bonar, Henry (Vertigo) Jones, and Charles (3 Nuts In Search Of A Bolt) Irving!

Talk about a horror show, Governor Jerry Brown even makes an appearance in Linda Ronstadt's gold record vault! Speaking of gold records, the very special music for "Project X" was created by Nathan Van Cleave! Van Cleave was a pioneer in the use of the theremin, and besides "The Colossus Of New York," and "Robinson Crusoe On Mars," he worked on many episodes of "The Twilight Zone!" The Lowrey Organ also got credits!

The first twenty minutes or so drag on forever, but it's a complicated story to set up. A spy comes back from China with secrets and artificially induced amnesia, is cryogenically frozen, and revived, and given a new simpler identity, so they can get inside his head and get the suppressed secrets that hold the fate of the whole world out of him. Since the spy was also a historian and an expert on the 1960's, they choose this headline and character from the past to make him think he is now a bank robber!

Christopher George puts in a fine performance as Hagen Arnold! George had a real familiar face to the people of the time because he had just come off a two year, 58 episode run as Sergeant Sam Troy, the star of TV's "Rat Patrol!" When he wakes up, he finds himself on the lam, and they proceed to a fake farmhouse the government has set up to hide out!

Once everything settles down, the scientists drug Hagen Arnold, hook him up, and start digging around inside his psyche!

The gates to the portals of Hagen's mind open wide to let the government in....

....and they can watch and listen to the whole thing in psychedelic wide screen HD!

To make the facade look authentic 60's, they had to toss around some men's magazines!

Hagen doesn't like being cooped up, so after a couple of days, they let him escape, and he accidently meets with one of the future locals absent from her job at either the kinnery, or the cannery.

The perky Greta Baldwin is Karen Summers! She gets second billing in the credits even though her part has essentially no reason to even exist, except they needed to get a good looking woman into the cast somehow! Greta was in one other movie in the same year titled "Rogue's Gallery," and that was it for her! Other than that, it's very difficult to find any other info about her!

Somebody had some solid ideas about the future. Here Karen is given what appears to be an electronic cigarette to wile away her time!

There are some great animated sequences from the Hanna-Barbera Studios, and the combined comics genius minds of Alex (Space Ghost) Toth and Carl (Scooby-Doo) Urbano!

Give William Castle some credit, he actually used a Chinese guy named Keye Luke to play the role of the Asian leader Sen Chiu! Sen Chiu proclaims several times in this long drawn out speech, that just like Lucky of last week, he too, is indeed, Inscrutable!!!

The future of Asia! That tube is taking Hagen Arnold into a futuristic underwater prison! They don't take up space topside, and they are also used to raise food! Pretty elaborate for what looked like a prison for only one person!

Hagen Arnold is rescued from the prison by his scuba diving partner, co-pilot and buddy, Monte Markham as the unpredictable Gregory Gallea! Monte has been on countless TV shows over the years, and is still gainfully employed with films set to come out this and next year!

Can this dynamic duo possibly break on through the doors of perception to the other side?

Later, something akin to "Forbidden Planet's" Id has escaped from Hagen Arnold's mind because they peered into his brain longer than they were supposed to, and it's reeking terror and destruction on Karen Summers and Gregory Gallea!!

The super familiar face of a man with a similarly common name Henry Jones, as Dr. Crowther peers in on what is now left of Gregory Gallea. They squeezed all the answers out of Gallea's brain like a giant zit, and the world continues to be a safe place to live!

They wipe Hagen Arnold's brain clean once more, give him another new identiy, and him and Karen get to live together happily ever after, William Castle style!!

Friday, February 24, 2012

A TRIP TO THE MOON / Star-Film - 1902

It's Friday with Tabonga, here at The Dungeon!.. Our feature was written and directed by Georges Méliès, and, plays Prof. Barbenfouillis in this early sci-fi short from France. Estimated budget was 30,000 Francs. The story is based on the books "From the Earth to the Moon" by Jules Verne and "The First Men in the Moon" by H. G. Wells.

Georges had, get this, 553 short movie directing credits from 1896 to 1913!! A few titles are A TERRIBLE NIGHT, CONJURING, THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, A NIGHTMARE, SEA BATHING, THE HALLUCINATED ALCHEMIST, THE DEVIL'S CASTLE, THE DEVIL'S LABORATORY, FOUR HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE, A TRIP TO THE MOON (1898), BLACK ART, A NOVICE AT X-RAYS, THE CAVE OF THE DEMONS, FANTASTICAL ILLUSIONS, THE DEVIL'S ISLAND, THE SNOW MAN, THE CLOWN AND THE AUTOMOBILE, THE DOCTOR AND THE MONKEY, THE DANGEROUS LUNATIC, THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY, THE CLOWN vs SATAN, THE HUMAN FLY, THE MAGICIAN AND THE IMP, BEWITCHED DUNGEON, ARTIST AND THE DUMMY, BEELZEBUB'S DAUGHTERS, THE MONSTER, FAUST IN HELL, THE CRAZY COMPOSER, SOAP BUBBLES, THE WITCH, TWO CRAZY BUGS, SEEIN' THINGS and THE GHOST OF SULFER MOUNTAIN! Wow, I'll bet those are some tough titles to come by!!..

Little Rufus The Gnat is here to start the show, so, push the big red 'GO' button there by the toaster oven, now, Rufus! Here's some silent music for... A TRIP TO THE MOON!

When you decide to go to the Moon, well, you have to build a spaceship first... In this case, a big bullet!

Hey, looks like something interesting's going on over there!

These Reubenesque beauties have the official duty of seeing the brave expolrers off!

After the colossal cannon shoots the capsule into space, it finally comes to rest on the iconic face of The Man In The Moon! Even in the great British comedy, THE MIGHTY BOOSH, The Man In The Moon is a regular character.

The explorers exit the capsule, then, are amazed when they watch the Earth rise into the sky.

Ballet girls from the Theatre du Chatelet were used in these scenes.

The explorers have to make their way through this amazing underground fungus garden!

Here are the leaders of the Moon with their army of skeletal warriors, the Selenites. The creatures were played by acrobats from the Folies-Bergere.

The explorers escape and make their way to the capsule, followed in hot pursuit by the Selenites. One of the men jumps onto the rope tied to the ship and pulls it off its rocky perch...

The capsule falls back to Earth and crashes into the ocean!

Georges Méliès used miniatures, matte paintings, animation, double exposure and other camera and stage tricks to achieve his images. Director D.W. Griffith said, "I owe him everything" and Charles Chaplin called him "the alchemist of light!"

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

THE MUMMY'S CURSE - Codee and Orth - "Hey, You!" (1944)

Curse that dang mummy, who's he think he is anyway, Lon Chaney??

Well, the reason this classic has got our ear tonight, is because at the very beginning of the film, the viewer is treated to this special moment, a pretty cool song by the lady of the house, the Belgian beauty Ann Codee, as barkeeper Tante Berthe! The song is called "Hey, You" and was written by her husband Frank Orth, along with another gentleman, Oliver Drake. Ann and Frank had a vaudeville act back in the day, called what else but "Codee and Orth!"

Unless something changes, this will be the last sound clip we feature! It's gotten far too complicated to be fun any more, and Kurt Katch as Cajun Joe agrees 100%. So our focus will no longer be on the music, but more on the films themselves. I thought offering up a short sound collage was a good way to give more insight, but I didn't know it was going to be such a headache. So welcome to the new look....

Peter Coe is Dr. Ilzor Zandaab, racial profiling aside, is it really possible to trust a guy wearing a fez?

What's really incarnately evil is the power duo of Dr. Zandaab with the fez, and Martin Kosleck, the future supremely execrable Professor Peter Bartell in "The Flesh Eaters!"

They've got a lot in common! Looks like the prefect couple to me!!

Virginia Christine is Princess Ananka, and you gotta admit, she cleans up pretty good!!

Kharis, the peeping mummy! What a perv!

You better watch out, because in about 15 minutes of so, I'm gonna get you!!

Kind of an awkward time to catch up on your pole dancing techniques, isn't it ladies?

This is one awesome painted backdrop, and they wisely use it more than once!

It's not bad enough that Lon had to wear all those bandages, and carry Christina around, now it's time to go up stairs! Great!!

Big Thanx to Douglas McEwan for sharing the following tasty bit of information, and correction in the Comments Section:

"I knew Virigina Christine a little bit, who was a wonderful woman, the wife of lip-popping Fritz Feld. I talked with her once about this movie. She told me that when Lon as Kharis had to carry her up those worn and uneven temple steps, she was strapped to him under her and his costumes, so he literally could not drop her.

Unfortunately, they shot it after lunch. In those days, sad but true (Remember, this is what Virginia Christine told me herself, face-to-face), Lon drank his lunch and was very drunk when they shot it. (Universal usually tried to get Lon's scenes in all movies shot in the mornings, because he was always useless after lunch.)

So predictably, Lon fell in doing the scene, fell on her! Since she was strapped to him, she couldn't get loose or out from under this much, much larger person, and was severly squished aganst the steps under Lon until they could first cut her loose and then roll him off of her. They could not roll him off of her when she was still strapped to him, It was impossible.

So Lon then went off to his dressing room to drink the rest of the day away, and Eddie Parker came in and shot the scene. That's Eddie Parker carrying her up the stairs in your screencap above."

The lighting on this shot is really cool, and they use it on each group of people that come down the stairs!

Despicable contra Loathsome, who will come out behind?

The pith helmet just sets off the whole shot!

"The man in the fez, he turns around and sez, I'd like to help you make your trip!" - Country Joe

All right kids, go off, and be good now, ya hear? Right!! You can't tell me they didn't knock it out before they even got out of the tomb!

Monster Music

Monster Music
AAARRGGHHH!!!! Ya'll Come On Back Now, Y'Hear??