Surprisingly…. for an American made horror film that’s nearly 2 years old, your Favorite Catgirl only managed to run across this on on it’s Region 2 UK DVD release just a week or so ago. I’ve been unable to confirm it was even ever released here in the good ol’ US of A… but it’s certainly found it’s way everywhere else lately, from Germany, the UK, and even in a Region 3 release in Thailand.

Our synopsis goes like this: “When rugged country boy John takes his city raised friends on a weekend trip back to his deceased uncle’s remote ranch to hunt wild pigs, it seems like a typical “guys getaway with guns” – despite the presence of John’s sexy girlfriend Brooks. But as John and his crew trek deeper into the marijuana filled hills of Northern California, they find a wilderness laced with rednecks, lots of high powered weaponry, and a killer cult of machete toting hippie beauties, only to learn the awful truth about his late uncle’s death and the truth behind the local legend of “The Ripper” — a murderous 3000 pound man-eating wild boar!”

Now Neko’s seen killer Aussie piggies….. killer Korean pork on a rampage….. so am I ready for some good ol’ American “Pig-foot” action? More importantly…. is Carolyn? (Hehehehe!! At least this one is in English….)

Since all you gentle visitors here at the Litterbox probably are “Killer Pig movie” fans too, you best not waste any more time them. Let’s “Read On”, shall we?

Killer pigs….. Ever since “Razorback” waaaay back in 1984, people have known that the humble pig was definitely a serious contender in the exploitation genre of “When Animals Attack”…. so it should come as no surprise that there’s another deadly oinker out there creating yet more bloody mayhem. I seem to have missed this one somehow back when it was first made, but thanks to the recent Region 2 UK release, I’m all set now. Ordinarily… when a movie like this skips theatrical release and then turns up on overseas DVD release first, it’s a sure sign of major “craptastic” film making at it’s best… or would that be at it’s worst? In any event… this lil’ Catgirl has never let that stand in the way of getting my vicarious “Bad movie” fix before, so why start now?

This one starts out as former hick and “good ol’ boy” John Hickman (played by Travis Aaron Wade) is preparing to leave for a weekend hunting trip with his city bred buddies Ben, Wayne and Quincy (played by Howard Johnson, Jr, Rajiv Shah, and Trevor Bullock respectively). So it’s off to the wilds of Northern California where he grew up in his deceased uncle’s old cabin….. definitely your typical drunken male bonding… with guns… except for one small item he forgot to tell the guys. His girlfriend Brooks (played by Tina Huang) isn’t too keen on him going unless she can go along too. Needless to say…. the guys aren’t happy about that at all.

Yep… sounds like a pretty familiar plot so far, and it’s got all the usual standard elements you’d expect… with one major difference. Usually our male lead in a story like this is hunky and brooding… with some sort of tragic past that makes him a sympathetic character despite his somewhat questionable tastes in best friends. Unfortunately for “Pig Hunt”, our hero John just isn’t that appealing…. in fact I took a rather quick dislike to him almost immediately. Strangely enough… his girlfriend Brooks is the character I became interested in. She’s a pretty, smart, tough, resilient Asian girl who’s waaaay out of her jerk of a boyfriend’s league. If she’s got any flaw, it’s the fact that she’s in love with a total tool like John’s character at all…… Sigh. But it’s true that some girls do fall for those superficially attractive “bad boys”, and that’s how this relationship comes across to me anyway.

Once we leave the city, it isn’t long before our lil’ group manages to find their way to the incredibly rural wilderness where the majority of our story takes place. One stop later at a quaint little country store and our city boobs know the local story of “The Ripper”… the biggest baddest 3000 pound pig to ever roam the forest in search of hunters stupid enough to intrude on his domain. Oh…. and they find out all about John’s late alcoholic uncle too… and his Moby Dick sized obsession with the Ripper, an obsession that just might have led to his grisly death…. if he didn’t shoot himself in a drunken fit as John has always believed. Given this cute story… our boys stock up on beer and plan to bag themselves some big pig for a trophy.

But…. before they leave, they meet Cimi (played by Cimi Ahluwalia), the leader of a cult-like hippie commune and a couple of the veritable horde of drugged out white women that follow him. He’s one voodoo priest lookin’ scary guy with a big ol’ kukri and nearly ends up getting in a dust up with John and the guys after teasing Brooks with a rattlesnake. You just know we’re gonna see him and the girls again….

At last they make it to John’s uncle’s cabin…. a crazy abandoned place that looks like it was decorated in early “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” meets “Hannibal Lecter”. Neko hasn’t seen that many animal bits used as  home decor in many a year I’ll tell ya… It’s soooo bad, our heroes don’t even stay in the cabin, opting instead to pitch tents in the front yard. Next day… a couple of John’s old local “friends”, Jake and Ricky show up. Talk about vicious inbred redneck hicks…. these two make the hillbilly cast of “Deliverance” look like Harvard alumni. Somehow they manage to get our boys to let them guide the group on their hunt even though Brooks is starting to get the idea they should all just high tail it back to LA.

But we wouldn’t have much of a movie if we let that happen now would we?
Our little group sets out for the “Big Wallow”…. which is just the sort of place it sounds like…. and the wild boar said to inhabit that neck of the woods. Here’s where our little camping trip goes soooo sooo bad. Along with the hogs, there a gigantic secret crop of marijuana and the inevitable accidental shooting occurs….. (Well.. OK… maybe not so accidental a shooting……) leaving one of our dumb-ass crazy homicidal country boys dead as a doorknob. Seen “Deliverance”? Then you know what’s just gotta follow…. Yep, an all out war between our little group and the deadly rednecks (Who apparently are big fans of the “Road Warrior” too…. Never seen quite that many goofy lookin’ hillbillies riding dune buggies and motorcycles in my life!!). Of particular note here is my personal favorite vicious dumb redneck who just can’t set out in hot pursuit of vengeance without first donning his gas mask before riding off on his motorcycle….. He had me laughing sooooo hard I almost choked on my popcorn. Here the story gets violent, bloody and oh so personal. But…. still no real “Giant Piggy” action!!

Yep…. up to now our film has been teasing us. There’s been a couple of tense moments, a hunter getting gobbled up in the very beginning, and a horse being beheaded by a gigantic “something” but no real “Razorback” style moments of horror. Thank goodness Ben gets shot and wounded by the rednecks…. it lets him stumble his way to the hippy commune where the harem of fanatic hippy chicks can take care of his wounds with a little TLC right before setting him up as a sacrifice to their God of the Wilderness, the Ripper!!

Not much movie left to go, (and by now not a whole lot of cast either) so it’s really not all that surprising when the war between our cityfolk and rednecks spills over into the insanity of Cimi and his crazy cult of pig worshiping hippy girls…. There’s plenty of body-count as the three groups start killing each other off in lots of terribly violent ways. Eventually it’s down to just John, Brooks, and Cimi….. Oh, yeah…. and one big mutant hog from Hell. Think you know how it ends? Well…. Ok…. you’d be right. No surprise, our girl Brooks and her boyfriend make it…. (Although Neko was sorta hoping he’d end up Pig Food giving Brooks the opening she needed to waste the Ripper at the climax… Oh well. Can’t have everything.) Roll those credits!!

How does this one stack up? Surprisingly well, actually. Despite the problem of having a basically unlikeable group of protagonists, the overall story has all the right elements to make for a simple evening of crazy bloody fun. Luckily I really did like Tina Huang as Brooks…. without her to root for, “Pig Hunt” probably wouldn’t have been worth watching as there is actually very little “Pig-zilla” fun and games. The effects, stunt work and action sequences are all well done, making it at least work on the level of a simple action film. As a horror film though, it’s a bit of a let down, with no real suspenseful moments to remember overall and a lack of screen time for our giant hog. Like the Aussie “Razorback”, our big piggy in this one is actually giant robot critter, but here it gives the film an “old school” horror movie charm that the recent overabundance of CGI films have somehow forgotten.

Neko ended up enjoying “Pig Hunt” 0verall despite these few quibbles and I give it 3 “Meows” out of 5 for doing most of the exploitation elements of the genre justice and giving me a decent heroine to root for even if I soooo wished her love interest dead. The UK Region 2 PAL disc is spartan, but acceptable. Hopefully it’ll pop up on Region 1 as well, giving US fans a chance to see it without having to import it from overseas.

Is there a Trailer? Do giant killer pigs poop in the woods? Hehehehe!!

Synopsis? Do we really need one? No, not really, but here it goes… “Three sexy “Bad Girls” travel to a remote desert hideaway to steal $200 million in diamonds from a ruthless underworld kingpin and things quickly spiral out of their control. Allegiances get switched, truths get revealed, criminals are unmasked and nothing (or nobody) is quite what it seems as the fate of the world is precariously balanced upon the fates of this trio of sexy femme fatales.”

Made by two of the people involved with the wacky and  super silly “Hercules” and “Xena, Warrior Princess” TV shows (as well as many of the same cast and crew), this one looked to be a fun little slice of naughty fun just the way Neko likes them. Not only that…. but it let me tell my sweet Carolyn that I finally had an honest to goodness English dialog movie for us to watch together…. (However, I might just have neglected to tell her the title….. Thank goodness she loves me… Hehehehe!!)

I’m expecting some gratuitous violence… some over-the-top bad girl combat… crazy villains that seriously need to be slapped, and all the exploitation goodies that can be crammed into a single movie. Will I get my wish?

Guess we’ll all have to “Read On” to find out…..

This one starts out with a nifty scene of complete devastation…. fire, wreckage strewn haphazardly in all directions… and the bloody, yet ever so sexy Trixie (played by Julia Voth) asking just how such a scene could have ever have come to pass. But before we learn that, it’s into a psychedelic opening credit sequence featuring nifty clips from just about every “bad girl exploitation” film you can think of with a rocking theme to get your motor running. This alone tells you that the team of Eric Gruendemann and Rick Jacobson, the writer/directors of “Bitch Slap” know exactly what the audience for this sort of film is looking for. They waste no time letting us know we’re going to take one hell of a ride to exploitation heaven….. embracing almost every theme the genre knows.

First… we get a sweet black 63′ Thunderbird roaring down a desert road to a desolate rundown Trailer in the middle of nowhere…. In a cloud of dust, our three anti-heroines disembark in slow motion, all the better to strut their stuff, before opening the trunk to reveal the beaten and disheveled crime boss, Gage. No time for pleasantries… it’s time to beat some info outta him about the location of a hidden treasure… 200 million in diamonds to be exact. (And you know just how we girls like diamonds…) This is the centerpiece to the whole film… those diamonds… and a few other things.

You see the film has one neat little trick…. It’s actually two stories in one… The first moves forward telling all about the girls, the Trailer, and the diamonds. The second is shown throughout as a series of flashbacks… each looking further and further into the past behind this caper and each revealing more and more of the truth behind what’s really going on. It’s a clever little device that gives nice payoff for paying attention to the story as it unwinds. Even better.. each flashback was filmed with limited sets augmented by quite a bit of green screen backdrops added in. Overall, it gives these flashbacks a slightly “cartoonish” style all their own, very reminiscent of the look of “Sin City” but in gorgeous technicolor, and helps to separate the two parallel stories nicely. Also… from the standpoint of keeping one’s budget down, it means that “Bitch Slap” really only has one live location to worry about…. our crappy little Trailer in the desert. Sheer genius!

Gage, the guy in the trunk, (played with amazing chauvinist gusto by “Hercules” alumni Michael Hurst) is no match for our determined young women. After a particularly brutal interrogation, he eventually spills the beans (and quite a bit of blood) about the diamonds and where he buried them before shooting off his mouth one time too many to suit resident bad-ass ex con, Camero (played by America Olivo). It’s a big mistake…. and one he most definitely doesn’t live to regret. One bullet to the noggin’ later and, like all good crime caper movies… it’s just the beginning of this rather shaky alliance’s unraveling.

Hel (played by Erin Cummings of “Spartacus: Blood & Sand” fame)…. the group’s unofficial leader… has her job cut out for her. She’s got to keep mad dog Camero in line while protecting naive stripper Trixe from the ugly side of what is turning out to be a rather bloody affair completely unlike the orderly caper she had planned. What would be the only thing to make the situation more complicated? Well how about if Hel was in a sweet, romantic, and very sexy lesbian relationship with Trixe while also having been intimately involved with Camero while they were together in “the joint… the slammer.. the big house”? Oh, my goodness, yes…. We can’t very well have an exploitation film without a wee bit of spicy lesbian action to livin’ things up. (About this time, Carolyn stopped giving me “The Look” for having tricked her into watching this one and kinda got interested in the story…. Naughty, naughty girl!!)

Naturally this leads to all sorts of jealousy and drives a further wedge between our characters. Before crazy Camero can do much though, yet another problem rears its ugly head. Out of nowhere… local Deputy Sheriff Roy Fuches (played by Ron Melendez) comes along looking to render aid and assistance our “damsels in distress”.  One bullshit story later and he leaves, never realizing how close he came to ending up like crime boss Gage. Good thing he was mostly thinking with the lil’ head and not the big one……

Yep…. Hel is one smart lady, and not exactly the person she’s represented herself as to either of her lovers and partners in crime. Neko can’t tell you who she really is without spoiling things, but trust me…. she not the only one with secrets. However…. those secrets have to wait. More uninvited guests arrive to crash the party…. this time old “friends” of Camero’s. These two, Hot wire and his lil’ Japanese psycho girlfriend Kinky (played by  William Gregory Lee and Minae Noji) want in on the fun too…. as well as a shot at grabbing the treasure for themselves. These two are a hoot!! Hotwire with his “Tourette’s Syndrome” fits is somehow actually twitchier than Camero, while Kinky and her razor bladed yo-yo gives us a perfect Psychotic Asian schoolgirl gone totally homicidal. Politically correct? Who are we kidding…. Not in this movie!!

All this leads to the eventual recovery of the treasure… as well as what Hel is actually after…. (but Neko’s not gonna tell ya what that is… So there!!) We get more fights… lots of swearing to put sailors to shame, some neat cameos from other “Hercules” and “Xena” alumni, and probably the single best knock down, ass kicking, non-martial art, no holds barred cat-fight I’ve ever seen between two women in any film… ever. Zoe Bell, the fight choreographer and stunt co-coordinator for this one has done a great job of making it all look both gritty and real, while keeping it fun and over-the-top. She get’s Neko’s top praise for her work here…. and it’s one of the reasons I ended up liking this one so much.

And like it I did. This one is low budget direct to video filmaking at it’s absolute best. The people involved went at this one with all guns blazing and an obvious love of the B movie “Bad Girls Gone Wild” genre that shows. I can believe that every penny spent on this production ends up right on screen where it belongs, and all involved gave it their all, beginning to end. The girls are sexy and strong and even as “bad” as they are, you still wanna root for them to win….. By the end of this one, even finicky Carolyn was enjoying herself, and that says a lot.

I give “Bitch Slap” an enthusiastic 4 “Meows” out of 5 for being a fun filled parody of 70′s B movies, with a great humor and gusto for the silliness of it all, and deserves a place with other cult favs in anyone’s DVD collection. Remember though, you have to like these sorts of crazy films… and luckily I do… otherwise it’s definitely not going to be your cup of tea. The DVD itself is also well done, with a marvelous 3 part “Making Of” featurette that must be watched as well as it gives you a perfect look at how such a movie could still be made even today.

So? Want a look at this one yourself? Here you go! Hurry up and get slapped silly!

Even if you haven’t seen this one you probably know it…. it’s that one with an alien gorilla/ robot wearing a space helmet with TV rabbit ears on top. Yep… that silly alien!!

Our synopsis? Well this one goes sorta like this: “While on an afternoon picnic excursion with his mother and two sisters, a young boy named Johnny meets a pair of archeologists who are recording the primitive paintings a nearby cave.

After having a rather nasty fall, he is knocked unconscious and has a weird dream in which the Earth has been totally conquered and most of humanity killed by a freaky alien “gorilla-bot” called the Ro-Man, using the deadly “calcinator death ray”. Apparently he and his family and the two scientists are the only survivors thanks to a secret inoculation serum. They try to survive and avoid capture and horrible death at the hands of Ro-Man, who, despite his alien origins, falls for Johnny’s sexy scientist sister Alice. Will humanity somehow defeat the unfathomably unstoppable Ro-man in his clumsy monkey suit and space helmet, or are we all…. doomed?”

Hehehe!! This one completely redefines the idea of low budget film making and the very idea that the ludicrous alien Ro-man is still so well known while many other characters, better imagined and better realized, have faded from memory, speaks volumes about it’s charm. Little Miyuki was never fooled by Ro-man…. but boy, did she ever eat this one up as a wee  impressionable girl. Certainly it’s a guilty pleasure for many of you gentle visitors as well…. so let’s all get nostalgic together and take another look at this unabashedly “craptacular” 50′s classic!!

If there was ever a film that said “To hell with making sense… I just wanna tell a story!”, then this one is it. Haven’t got money for a budget? No problem…. Haven’t even got money for a good alien costume? Heck, we got us a gorilla suit, and a space helmet…. what the hell more do we need? Locations? Hell…. Bronson Canyon is free, let’s go for it! What do you mean you want the alien to use giant dinosaurs to destroy Earth? That’s what stock footage is for….. silly. Stop your complaining…. we’ve got Elmer Bernstein doing the music, and he’s good, right? And hey!! We’re gonna shoot our effects budget to heck and do this puppy right… in 3-D!!

Producer Phil Tucker’s “Robot Monster” is notorious for it’s unbelievable levels of utter cinematic garbage all somehow crammed into one 62 minute film. This lil’ Catgirl would argue that it even surpasses Ed Wood’s infamous “Plan Nine From Outer Space” to wrestle away the title of “Worst Scifi Movie Ever”. After all, what other film is reputedly credited with sending it’s producer away for “hospital confinement’? Answer me that….

There is a plot to this one of course…. and unlike many other reviewers, I can’t say it’s incomprehensible…. just really, really stupid. In fact, the narrative is actually very easy to follow… it just doesn’t make all that much sense most of the time. But, then you have to realize the premise is that this is all just the hallucinatory dream of a young boy who just smacked himself in the head… really hard. Once you realize that… it’s all smooth sailing.

Anyway…. in his dream, Johnny’s Mom is somehow married to super smart scientist guy from the cave, while his older sister is sort of sweet on his hunky assistant… when they’re not fighting over who’s smarter or in charge. Ah… young love! About the only character pretty much the same is his dull as dishwater younger sister Carla…. who just wants to play house with Johnny, hallucination or not. So… how did they survive Ro-man’s one man, errr…. monkey?… errrr….. robot?… attack on the planet Earth? I mean he’s got a Death Ray!! Not just any ol’ Death Ray… but a “Calcinator” Death Ray….. (Whatever the heck that means… Maybe it turns folk to stone, but as we don’t see a whole lot of statues everywhere I sorts doubt it..) Ooooohhh!!! Isn’t that just the height of silly 50′s super-science mumbo jumbo?

All of Earth’s combined military might was powerless to stop one overweight robot gorilla, but luckily our super smart scientist figured out how to shield his bombed out basement by stringing a couple of sparking electrified wires around the walls…. probably explaining why this typical American family of the 1950′s didn’t seem to have a dog. Poor little guy probably went up like a french fry the first week…!

Not that Ro-man’s secret lair… conveniently located in the same cave from earlier… is any better equipped by his robo-monkey leader the “Great Guidance”. He does possess the sweetest soap bubble machine this side of a Lawrence Welk TV episode, all the left over army surplus radio gear a monkey could want, and a sweet wooden table to put it all on. Ohhhhh!!… and his cave even gets decent TV reception, a shame he seems to have destroyed all the TV stations on Earth though, all he gets is his lame boss on the line so he can get really bitched at for failing to kill all the humans on Earth, or our little rag tag group of survivors so he can threaten them with horrible, terrible death (if he can ever find them… d’ohh!!). Hmmmm? Wait a darn second here…. I guess it still does suck being a one robo-monkey invasion force.

Worse… despite being all robotic, advanced, and supposedly emotionless, he falls big time for Alice, Johnny’s sexy older sister. This leads to his downfall of course in the end, but not before we get the good ol’ “gorilla abduction” bit naturally.

To top everything off, Great Guidance just blasts everybody to bits for annoying him at the film’s climax…. That should do the trick, but why pass up the chance to unleash dinosaurs to eat up everything still living on the planet? Sounds like a plan. (To be certain, a pretty goofy plan, but a plan nonetheless…) Luckily… this is all just a dream.

As we wrap this up… Johnny wakes up with a bandaged noggin, a little sore but no worse for wear. Everybody goes back to the picnic to get cozy and all is well. But…. waaaay deep in the cave, shrouded by flashes of electricity, Ro-man lurches forward… squeezing the last bit of 3-D goodness out of this one and leaving us mercifully happy that it’s finally over.

You might get the feeling that your Favorite Catgirl didn’t like this one…. Nothing could be farther from the truth. “Robot Monster”, for all it’s flaws is a charming lil’ film that captivated and amused me in my days as lil’ Miyuki, Magical Kitten Princess. My older self can more readily see the gaping flaws in filmaking that are so obvious that they can’t be missed. However, if there’s a child in your life that needs entertaining, they would probably love this one to pieces, flaws and all. It’ll be a memory that will stick with them till they grow up and have kids of their own. Ahhh…. and if some day, a loved one buys them the DVD as a gift, it”ll bring back those treasured youthful days for a nostalgic visit once more. Always a welcome thing.

Given this, Neko can give “Robot Monster” a reasonable 3 “Meows” out of 5, saving it from the ignominious taint of a lower rating due mostly to the charm and downright silly feelings it still awakens in me (and the loving gesture my sweetie Carolyn made in buying it especially for lil’ ol’ me….). It’s not a good film, but it’s a fun one and somehow it survives even as more worthy films are lost forever…. and that’s got to be worth something, right?

Trailer? Boy oh, boy is there a Trailer…. hold on to your hats, ’cause here comes “Robot Monster”!! Be afraid…. be very afraid!!

Our Synopsis goes like this: “In the retro futuristic post-apocalyptic ruins of a deserted city, a small group of brave little robotic puppets led by a recently awakened “9″, battle evil machines for the right to rule over the lost world of Mankind…. Who will win this curious struggle and ultimately control the new world?”

Although produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov…. much of this film lies squarely on the shoulders of Shane Acker, creator of the imaginative short film upon which this one was based. I’d seen the Trailer of course, but this one turned out to be one of those films that just never made it to my lil’ town… so now that it’s newly out on DVD, I guess it’s time for your Favorite Catgirl to fix that particular lil’ oversight.

So… let’s all “Read On” and find out how this one ranks up, shall we?

Hmmmm? An animated movie about puppets fighting evil “Terminator”-like robot monsters….. Well you don’t get one of those every day now. This one starts out as our lil’ hero, 9 (voiced by Elijah Wood), gets put together with intricate loving care by the mysterious scientist who dies bringing him to life. How long he hangs, motionless before finally awakening is unknown….. but when he does, everything lies in ruin. With only a strange talisman and no memory of what came before or anyone to explain the world he’s suddenly found himself in, he’s forced to wander into the junk strewn world outside the shattered house in which he awoke searching for answers. Something bad happened here…. that much is evident, with ruin and decay and the remains of the dead everywhere to be found. It’s not our world…. instead the world of “9″ is a steampunk version of World War 1…. with all the terrible trappings of Trench warfare and the quaint houses and wrecked cars of the 1920′s or 30′s. Thankfully it doesn’t take little 9 long to find a friend in the arrival of one of his “brothers”… Number 2 (voiced by Martin Landau)…. who immediately takes him in hand, glad to find yet another like himself still alive in this forlorn place.

2 realizes that 9 is mute… and being the inventive lil’ bugger he is, he tinkers a broken doll’s speaking device into 9 so that he can communicate. 9 realizes there must be others like themselves and that he isn’t alone in this weird place, but before 2 can really tell him too much, a terrible mechanical thing attacks them. Half machine and half skeleton, and all nightmare it seemingly is bent on destroying them at any cost. It wants the magic talisman 9 found in the ruined house where he awoke you see…. and it’ll tear him to bits to get it. Luckily 2 manages to distract the evil thing allowing 9 to escape, even though it tears up his shoulder in the process. Overpowered, 2 gets captured and the monster takes him to an ominous towering factory on the horizon as 9 slips into unconsciousness.

9 later awakens in the ruins of an old church, where he meets one-eyed Number 5 (voiced by John C. Reilly), who sews 9′s shoulder together and comforts him. Number 1 (voiced by Christopher Plummer), seems to be the leader of the group, along with the muscle  of the hulking Number 8 (voiced by Fred Tatasciore), and he tells 9 that they have been hiding here ever since they awoke into the madness of the last days of “War of the Machines” that spelled the extinction of mankind. Later things quieted down as the machines won the war yet all but disappeared themselves. Except for the ever lurking Beast……

9 tries to get them to help him go to the factory and rescue 2….. but 1 will have none of that. He’s autocratic and inflexible in his views…. and will never take the kinds of risks that 9 suggests. Using 8 to bully them, he tells them they’ll only end up like the other absent members of the group 3,4 and 7 who are currently missing… having disobeyed his warnings against going out into the ruins to look for the truth behind their origins. 9 manages to convince 5 to come with him on a rescue mission to save his friend and together they sneak off to the old factory.

On the way…. they encounter 7, the only female member of the group, who’s gone all “wasteland warrior”…. and with her help they get into the factory and destroy the Beast… Cursed with an insatiable curiosity, 9 makes the mistake of placing the magic talisman into a socket in the great machine waking it from it’s inactivity. It comes to life…. and promptly uses the talisman to suck the life force right out of poor 2. Our little heroes barely escape….. and the machine begins to construct other horrible servants (like a nasty amalgam of baby doll, skeleton and snake) from the mixed debris of the factory…. you just know that’s gonna suck for the future happiness of the lil’ puppets.

From this point forward, the action switches to 9 and the group trying to undo the mistake of waking the evil machine….. as well as 9 learning exactly why they were made in the first place. There’s the standard creepy machine monsters to contend with… the friction between 1 and 9 over leadership of the group… and the eventual reuniting of all the surviving puppets to decide what they’ll do with the world they’ve inherited. It gets a bit deep and metaphysical here… as it seems all the puppets actually carry some portion of the old Scientist’s soul… as, it seems, does the Machine as well, although perverted by the Dictator who ruled the country so long ago. It’s never stated.. but apparently each of them has but a single facet of his psyche…. with 9 having perhaps the purest portion of it concerning his desires to build and explore. Not all our little heroes make it through… but Neko’s not going to spoil that for you. In the end, it’s a bittersweet chance for things to happen anew, perhaps for the better this time out. But that, I guess is left for the sequel…..

So overall, how was “9″? Well… it’s a technical triumph… with a visual style and look like nothing else I’ve ever seen. The characters, while a bit shallow, are engaging enough…. but somehow there just isn’t enough of a “spark of life” to make this one anything more than an interesting anime inspired fairytale. Neko liked it, but I wasn’t blown away by it. So… I’m giving “9″ a respectable 3 “Meows” out of 5 for being quirky, and interesting, but somehow just as empty inside as the puppets themselves. Maybe a bigger examination of the various personalities of a single individual at war with themselves might have helped here, but I’m thinking the story wasn’t ready to get that deep. A shame… as this one is soooo close to being that kind or original vision that would be memorable for decades to come. In the end…. it’s only a curiosity like some of the junk our heroes find in the ruins of their world, recognizable in it’s potential but now lifeless. But… I do think this one is worth a look…. even if it’s not a buy for most, it should be a rental. Give it a shot… you might just like it even more than me.

Naturally, there’s a nice Trailer floating around, so here we go… enjoy!

Our synopsis goes sorta like this…. “A mad scientist named Dr Arana (Jackie Coogan) is creating giant spiders and dwarves in his lab on Zarpa Mesa in Mexico. He wants to create a master race of superwomen by injecting his female subjects with spider venom.”

Now this certainly sounds like a reasonable and well thought out plan for world domination…. and to think some might call Dr. Arana mad…… So, how’s it all gonna work?

Badly, my first guess would be, but to find out for certain, we’ll all just have to “Read On” to find out!!

If you’ve ever read the HG Wells classic, “The Island of Dr. Moreau”, you’ve got the basic idea here….. weird science has always been fascinated with the somewhat goofy idea of using surgery and secret formulas to transform animals into people…. or nearly transform them, you see…. it never quite works out so well in actual application. It does however make for some nifty scifi horror exploitation most of the time and “Mesa of Lost Women” is no exception… (Why, oh why, do they NEVER try to make beautiful women out of fluffy bunnies or lil’ kittens instead of spiders, snakes,  or other ridiculously deadly choices….)

Mad Science is such a demanding profession after all….

We get this one started as we see an oil company employee driving his jeep somewhere in the fictitious “Muerto Desert” of Mexico, who rescues the intrepid freelance pilot, Grant Phillips (played by Robert Knapp) and Doreen (played by Mary Hill) whom he comes across wandering through the wasteland suffering from the ravages of exposure and dehydration. Barely alive, Grant babbles on incoherently with something about “needing to destroy “Them” before they scatter”. Uh-oh…. You just know that can’t be good…..

Brought to the “Amer-Exico Field Hospital” they soon recover thanks to the efforts of Dr. Tucker, the oil company doctor in charge of the clinic. Once he’s conscious, Grant starts in again with his crazy story about “super-monsters…or bugs” as all the oil company guys listen in disbelief. Grant begs then to load up a truck with oil and hurry to burn out the “bugs” before they scatter forever. Nobody believes him….. except Pepe, the Mexican local who works for the company…. and so begins a weird flashback…..

The movie is full of these sorts of jarring, abrupt shifts in story. Ultimately it serves to give one the impression this film was edited by a cretin armed with a chainsaw….. and he’s probably also they guy who chose the soundtrack….. OMG!! The music!! The soundtrack of “Mesa” is dominated… yeah, that’s definitely the word for it… by a terrible Flamenco guitar that soon has you absolutely hating the very sound of guitars, repeated over and over throughout the entire film. This music is simply horrible…. and it’s probably why Ed Wood Jr. stole it to use in the soundtrack of his own film, 1954′s “Jailbait”…..

Respected eminent scientist, Doctor Leland Masterson, the world’s leading specialist in research (Just exactly what SORT of research we are never told… I guess he’s famous enough we’re all just supposed to know) visits Dr. Arana at his forlorn desert laboratory on Zarpa Mesa in the heart of the infamous “Muerto Desert” to learn the details of the Arana’s latest experiments.Once he discovers Arana has been breeding giant tarantulas and that he’s been using a combination of special serums and surgery to transplant their glands into humans, he sorta freaks out. Apparently he’s crossed that ever so fine line into the whole “things man was not meant to know” territory…. even if this research has resulted in creation of mysterious hottie Tarantella (played in sultry silence by B-movie starlet Tandra Quinn). Passing up on the chance to join Arana and learn how to make all of his very own spider girls, he is seized and given an injection that destroys his mind and is allowed to escape. Eventually found wandering, he gets confined to an asylum for the hopelessly nutty from which he later escapes and abducts several people he meets at a seedy cantina (The best sequence of which is a seriously weird sexy dance number by Tarantella…..). He forces his hostages aboard an airplane that’s got some serious engine issues to make his getaway. When the plane catches on fire, the our pilot Grant has to make an emergency landing in a clearing atop a remote desert mesa…. yep…. on THAT very mesa. Hey now, what are the odds of that happening?

Much of the film now shifts to our heroes getting chased around the jungle…. yes, jungle…. waaaay up on top of a Mesa stuck in the middle of supposedly the most arid region in all Mexico. But… we’ll let that slide…. After getting captured by Arana’s combined dwarf and spider girl minions, we end up at the lab where Dr. Matheson finally comes to his senses, only to refuse Arana yet again when offered a chance to join him in his plot. There’s the prerequisite destruction of everything by explosion…. (Ever notice how all evil labs seem to have so many things in them that go boom? Neko certainly has….) But of course our hero Grant and heroine Doreen somehow make their escape in the nick of time…. and our flashback ends…..

The oil guys are certainly NOT gonna believe this goofy story. Neither are they going to send a bunch of trucks out into the desert to burn out “giant mutant spiders”, so instead we get a final image of one of Arana’s spider girls… still very much alive, and setting things up nicely for “Mesa of Lost Women 2 – Spider Girls Gone Wild!!”

Wow….. I didn’t think a movie this bad could even be made. But…. here it is. Not surprisingly…. this one has slid into the public domain, thus allowing it to reach me by way of budget DVD release, one of many, for this particular title. The print used had me thinking the bad editing was the result, perhaps, of years of neglect and abuse…. but nope… this one was a “reel” turkey to start with, and it’s taken the ravages of years to give it a faint and curious sort of humor. If you can manage to stand that damn guitar and sit through it’s mercifully short 70 minute running time, it’s definitely worth a look….

For certain, you’ll never call another movie “crappy” after seeing this one….. so maybe that’s “Mesa of Lost Women”‘s claim to fame after all. Neko gives this one an amazing 0 “Meows” out of 5…. an absolute first here at the ol’ Litterbox…. but I’ll allow it several purrs of happy contentment for at least giving me a chance to watch it all curled up cozy with my sweetie and Goober for a quiet evening at home. (Psssst!!…. and the giant Spider puppets were sorta neat…..)

Could there possibly even be a Trailer for a film as absolutely “craptastic” as this one? Yes… yes there is, and here it goes!

Loosely inspired by Poe’s writings, our synopsis for it reads: “Death and Debauchery reign in the castle of Prince Prospero (played by Vincent Price), and when it reigns… it pours! Prospero has only once excuse for his diabolical deeds–the devil made him do it! But when a mysterious, uninvited guest crashes his pad during a masquerade ball, there’ll be hell to pay as the party atmosphere turns into a danse macabre!”

Mmmmm…. now this one’s a real gem and has a warm place in my many early film memories so how could it not be a “Lil’ Kitten Classic”? I’ve seen it many times since my first encounter as a child on afternoon TV, and it’s always one of those films I can find time to watch over and over. That alone tells this Catgirl it’s got to be something special to hold such power after all these years.

But, of course you all want to know more…. so let’s all “Read On”!!

Our story concerns Prince Prospero (played by Vincent Price) the titular ruler of a small Italian fiefdom who is well known for his cruelty and wickedness. Every year at harvest time, Prospero throws a grand feast for all his fellow noblemen, while his peasants are stripped of their hard earned food and are left to starve. Two of these peasants dare to speak up in protest, so the ruthless prince orders them to be garroted for their impudence. A young woman, Francesca (played by Jane Asher), the daughter of one of the two men and fiancée of the other, begs Prospero to spare them this cruel fate. Smitten by her beauty, Prospero takes Francesca, her father (played by Nigel Green) and her lover Gino (played by David Weston) away to his castle. But….. thanks to the discovery of an old woman dying horribly of the obvious signs of the dreaded Red Death, he also orders the village burned to the ground.

At the castle begins Prospero’s attempts to win over Francesca by corrupting her innocence through manipulation and trickery. Here the real “meat and potatoes” of the story gets rolling as we get introduced to Prospero’s current paramour Julianna (played by Hazel Court). She’s just about as evil and wicked as he is… and knows exactly how long she’ll last if pretty young Francesca hangs around. She’s been cozy with Prospero long enough to recognize competition and lets Francesca know she’d better not have any plans to try to usurp her position at the castle… or else. Everybody else is pretty much secondary to the plot…. with perhaps the exception of Alfredo, Prospero’s main sycophant (played by Patrick Magee) who has more to do with a sub plot involving another Poe story, “Hop Frog” added in here to flesh out the plot a bit involving the revenge of a dwarf jester named Hop-Toad (played by Skip Martin) upon Alfredo who stupidly abuses his beloved Esmerelda (played by child actress Verina Greenlaw & dubbed by an uncredited woman actress), a pretty midget ballerina for whom Alfredo has lustful designs for.

Prospero pretty much tells his guests to settle in for the longest party on record…. They’ll keep him amused and do his bidding or he’ll simply throw them out of the castle to the mercy of the plague that now ravages the countryside. Most of these idiots are so darn glad for the chance to curry favor that they’ll debase themselves in whatever manner he wants…. much to his amusement and poor innocent Francesca’s horror.

It doesn’t take long to throw in some Satanism (Movies just loved that notion in the 60′s and early 70′s)…. seems Prospero has been a worshiper of his for a while and Julianna has been long toying with the idea of becoming one of the “Handmaidens of Satan” herself… it just takes the threat of Francesca replacing her at Prospero’s side to convince her to undergo the terrible ritual needed to “seal the deal” with the Lord of Flies…. Here we get some pretty nasty self mutilation in the form of branding her breast with the reversed cross of Satan and a hallucinogenic dream sequence before Julianna finds herself damned forever. One seriously bloody bird attack later, and the honeymoon is over….. I guess Satan just isn’t into divorce.

Meanwhile Francesca’s dad and Gino are being held in the dungeon…. First they try to get the two to learn sword fighting so the two can try to kill each other in grand style for the party guests amusement…. when that fails, they come up with a goofy Russian roulette idea involving a poisoned dagger in a group of daggers. It doesn’t end well… and Francesca’s dad nearly kills Prospero before getting cut down. Gino is alive, but Prospero shows him his “mercy” by throwing him out of the castle… granting him his freedom, but dooming him to death by the plague….

Luckily the plague itself is more than just a mindless pestilence…. it’s a very real presence personified by a mysterious figure dressed in a scarlet monks robe. Not only that…. but it seems Prospero is on this supernatural spirit’s hit list and it’s willing to help Gino return to the castle and save Francesca in return for somehow aiding the Red Death in it’s attempts to enter the castle. Just in time for the grand ball….. First Hop Toad gets his revenge on Alfredo, trapping him in an ape costume and burning him alive before the other guests. Then Gino arrives…. and the Red Death with him. He’s told simply to wait at the battlements, as the Red Death itself stalks through the revelers spreading it’s deadly touch….. At first Prospero mistakes him for Satan, his Master, but soon discovers his mistake and is trapped at last in a hell of his own making here on earth…. just another victim of the plague with his face that sweeps through the castle slaying all the guests and making a tomb of the place.

At the end…. the Red Death meets it’s brothers at a crossroads…. and they discuss the death they have sown in their journeys. It’s revealed that only six now survive here, a young girl, Francesca and Gino, Hop Toad and Esmerelda and one lone old man in the burnt out village. A quick quote from Poe’s story, and it’s off to the end credits….. “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

Mmmmmm… now this one was certainly a movie like they just don’t make anymore. Absolutely the best of Corman’s Poe adaptions, it benefited greatly from a budget and shooting schedule almost double his usual allotment for such a film. Also, being shot in England, he was able to use many preexisting sets, backdrops, and wardrobe from other productions at the studios where it was filmed that give it a lavish, expensive, and unique look which he well exploits. Cinematographer Nicolas Roeg does an amazing job filming these sets and really makes the overall film look like it cost far more than it did. Add some class actors and this one shines as an excellent example of the genre. Vincent Price is at his best…. and although many reviews find him to be somewhat of a overrated ham, they fail to grasp the sheer talent he had for taking some of the most melodramatic dialog ever written in these films and investing his characters with an unearthly presence that transcends the sometimes silly material.  At no time do you not feel this when he is center screen….. and he could do more with his facial expressions than many other actors could do with a page of dialog.

For it’s sheer sumptuous look, it’s style and it’s slow brooding menace, Neko gives “Masque of the Red Death” 4 “Meows” out of 5…. it’s not the most gut wrenching of horror films, but what it might lack in shocks or gruesomeness it more than makes up for with sheer classic looks and Gothic creepy mood. Little Miyuki loved it, as she did all these classic Poe films, and grown-up me still does….. If you’ve never seen this one, I guess I can only say “For goodness sake, why not?”

Naturally there’s just got to be a Trailer for such a classic film as this, and here it is….. Enjoy the terror!

Now I know you are all wondering… “Miyuki? You really mean you haven’t ever done a review for this one? How is that even possible?” It does sound somewhat silly for your Favorite horror movie lovin’ Catgirl Princess to have somehow missed this particular classic film here at the ol’ Litterbox, but we can fix that up right now, now can’t we!

Our synopsis goes like this: “Architect Oliver Reed falls in love with beautiful Irena Dubrovna and they duly marry. But Irena refuses to give herself to Oliver, believing that there is something evil inside herself. She tells him of her Serbian ancestors who were reputed to be able to transform into cats when angered.

As Oliver’s frustration and unhappiness grows, he seeks consolation in the arms of co-worker Alice Moore. But a series of near-attacks on the two of them leave him wondering if Irena has not become jealously deranged or if maybe her Serbian legends are true and that she is turning into a cat person to avenge herself on them.”

Oooooh! Mysterious girls from the Balkans that can turn themselves into man eating panthers!! I don’t remember exactly when lil’ Miyuki first encountered this one, but I do remember it was a truly creepy, truly different sort of horror movie and that I liked it a lot even way back then.

Does it still hold up today? I guess we’ll have to give it another watch and find out. Let’s go!

When I was a girl, it was still possible if you were so inclined, to spend quite a few precious hours watching oodles of classic black & white horror and scifi movies on Saturdays and Sundays…… one of the things that obviously helped to shape my fertile imagination and let me grow up into the somewhat quirky woman that I am today. It’s a shame that 500 channels and an almost pathological dislike of anything not in color, or inspired by a video game, or anything made over 20 years ago that prevents the current generation from the simple joy of many of these films not shown except on rare occasion anymore on mainstream TV. That’s a shame…. especially when you realize that today’s kids miss such wonderful gems like… “The Cat People”.

Made in 1942 by producer Val Lewton for RKO studios and directed by Jacques Tourneur, the film stars Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph, and Tom Conway in a smart sophisticated tale of psychological horror with surprisingly adult sexual undertones for a film of it’s genre and era. Made for a tiny budget of only $141,659, it amazingly brought in nearly $4 million over the next two years and is credited with saving the studio from near financial disaster. Not bad for a little movie like this….. certainly good enough to spawn a sequel, “Curse of the Cat People” in 1944 as well as a more forgettable remake in 1982 starring Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell.

This one starts out in the ordinary everyday familiarity of the city zoo, as Serbian-born fashion designer Irena Dubrovna (played by french actress Simone Simon) spends her lunch hour making sketches of the zoo’s black panther. Pretty… and talented, she easily catches the eye of construction designer Oliver Reed (played by Kent Smith). Despite his attempts at witty small talk, he nearly blows it…. as Irena seems disinterested in his overtures. But eventually he lucks out when Irena reluctantly invites him back to her apartment for tea. But, ominously, as they walk away, one of Irena’s discarded sketches is shown to be of a panther impaled on a sword, a macabre foreshadowing of the things to come.

Back at her apartment, Oliver sees an antique statue, a crowned medieval figure on horseback impaling a cat upon a sword. Irena tells Oliver that the figure is of King John of Serbia and then tells him the folklore behind the image. According to her story, her ancestral village was located in a region once reputed to be the last hideout of a group of terrible Satan worshipers that were eventually wiped out by King John for their evil ways. However, “the wisest and the most wicked” of them managed to escape this fate, fleeing into the mountains where they are still supposed to be hiding today, modern bogeymen for Serbian children to fear. Something about this tale tells you Irena feels some secret shame for her ancestry which is tainted by the legends of these evil people, and it obviously makes her shy away from Oliver… but despite her feelings, she falls deeply in love with him, and he with her, leading to a whirlwind marriage….. but Oliver doesn’t know the true depths of her fear.

It eventually becomes clear that Irena really and truly believes herself to be descended from these wicked evil cultists, and that her greatest fear is that she will be transformed into a murderous black panther if ever deeply aroused by the emotions of passion, anger, or jealousy and kill any foolish enough to be near her. Not wanting to risk his life, she pathologically avoids sleeping with her new husband. Desperate to free her from this delusion, Oliver persuades her to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Judd, (played by Tom Conway). Rationally, the doctor tries to convince her that all those fears she has are less about old folk stories and more about the perfectly natural everyday fears of a sexually repressed and timid young woman confused about the desires she feels for the first time in her life.

Unfortunately, the whole situation is complicated when Oliver confides these sensitive marital problems to his attractive fellow co-worker, Alice Moore (played by Jane Randolph). Hurt and jealous of Alice, who obviously also has romantic feelings for Oliver, she feels betrayed…. provoking the curse to surface. Or does it? Alice feels threatened by an ominous presence while swimming alone in a pool. In the darkness, she seems to be stalked by a large animal, shown only by its lurking shadow. Only the safety of the water seems to keep the creature at bay and saves her life. After it leaves, Alice climbs out, beginning to wonder if she had imagined the whole thing. That is, until she finds her robe torn to shreds.

Eventually the stresses of all this tear the two apart, and Oliver tells her he wants a divorce. This is more than Irena can stand and she loses all control of the curse. Later on, while at work, Oliver and Alice are cornered by the terrible panther that is Irena. Thinking quickly, Oliver grabs his trusty T-square and wields it as a cross warding them from the evil that has possessed Irena and forces her to flee. After the panther leaves, they call Dr. Judd to try to warn him to avoid Irena, but he hangs up on them when she shows up seeking help. Attracted to her, the doctor makes the fatal mistake of trying to kiss her. She transforms into a panther before his very eyes and kills him, although he does manage to wound her first. When Oliver and Alice arrive a few minutes later, she slips away, having regained her control and regained her human form as well, and goes to the zoo. There, she opens the panther’s cage and lets it kill her to end the terror once and for all.

With it’s understated themes of repressed sexual desire expressing itself as a tangible and deadly destructive spirit, “Cat People” was pretty well ahead of it’s time in 1942… Lil’ Miyuki never picked up on any of that stuff….. it was just a neat variation on the old werewolf movie for me back then, but now I can say I really admire the clever way the whole plot is woven around that idea without once getting gratuitous or scandalous about it. It’s also a film that understands the idea of keeping much of the scary stuff just out of sight…. to great effect. I can definitely say it uses every one of it’s 73 minute running time, making it an easy film to watch and yet feel like it was complete and unhurried. Neko gives it 4 “Meows” out of 5 and if you’ve somehow missed it in the deluge of junk on your 500 cable channels or never once picked it up at the video store, you really, really ought to. They honestly don’t make them like this anymore……

Oooohhh!! There’s even a nifty Trailer available for this one too…. and here it is!

Our synopsis reads like this: “Teenagers Steve Andrews (played by Steve McQueen) and his girlfriend Jane Martin (played by Aneta Corsaut) are making out and watching the stars when they see a large meteor fall to Earth nearby so they go in search of it. Before they find it an old man discovers the meteor and the weird jelly creature contained within. It attaches itself to his arm, and by the time the two kids find him the creature is already dissolving him away. They take him to a local doctor for help, but when the monster grows out of control and absorbs both the old man as well as the doctor and his loyal nurse, the kids find themselves unable to convince the local authorities that their peaceful little town is now in deadly peril from…. the Blob!!”

Gooey space monsters that look like cherry jello? As well as the great Steve McQueen in his first starring role? Yep… you just know that this lil’ Catgirl totally ate this one up as a kid. So what’s the big deal about this one? Let’s all “Read On” and see what gives it such memorable class.

Now, first up you gotta know that lil’ Miyuki was waaaaay into monster movies when I was a wee girl. The crazier the better….. vampires, zombies, and wolf men were OK, but what really got me excited were flying saucers, aliens, and mutant monsters from outer space. So when this one showed up on old Saturday morning TV, I was in seventh heaven!! Such a simple concept!! The Blob was nothing more than a giant mass of red jelly…. no eyes… no face… no tentacles… but it sooo totally worked. How could this Halloween pass without giving it another look? (Well…. that and finally be able to tease Carolyn by telling her we were going to watch a Steve McQueen movie last evening….. Somehow I think she was expecting “The Towering Inferno”. I thought she knew me better than that by now…. Hehehehe!!)

This one is an amazing film when you consider that it was originally an independently produced film…. not the product of a major studio. I imagine that Steve McQueen still shakes his head to this day when he thinks about how this was the film that launched his career…. but it’s a nice little example of the early scifi horror genre that came out of the atomic era of the 50′s and that truly blossomed in the space age 60′s. He’s just gotta be kicking himself too…. as he received only a $3,000 paycheck for his role in it. Unfortunately, he turned down the original offer for a smaller up-front payment with a 10 percent take of the profits because he never….ever… in his wildest dreams thought the movie would even make any money at all. Surprisingly, it became a runaway success in the drive in circuit, in great part due to his starring in it just as his new TV series “Wanted: Dead or Alive!” had made him a nationwide star. Thanks to that, this modest lil’ film ended up grossing $4 million. Not bad for some man eating cherry jello on a rampage….

It’s a simple film…. with a simple story from a simpler time, perfect for a wee little monster fan like I was back in the late 70′s and early 80′s. We start out on a starry night in small town Pennsylvania with young teenage lovers Steve Andrews (McQueen) and Jane Martin (Corsaut) at the beginning of a date just as a genuine shooting star whizzes out of the sky and slams to Earth so close that Steve just knows they can find where it landed! Before they find it… an old hermit locates the meteor…. and with the gumption of generations of crazy old coots, proceeds to poke the bejeebits out of that ol’ meteor with a stick… Ahhhh!…. makes one nostalgic for the good ol’ days when such colorful characters were always on the front line…. ready to meet any nasty alien menace with such proactive measures!!

That ol’ meteor breaks open…. revealing it’s gooey center, and then promptly running up that ol’ stick to start in on dissolving our nameless geezer but good! Luckily for him, Steve and Jane finally show up, and Steve is quick to hustle the old man off to Doc Hallen for emergency de-”goo-ification”. Unfortunately, it isn’t long before good old Doc and his faithful nurse both get devoured by the rapidly growing alien goo and even though Steve sees it happen the local police remain skeptical. Seems Steve made the mistake of engaging in some drag racing backwards down the highway with some of his juvenile delinquent buddies earlier in the evening… so now his credibility is shot to heck… D’ohh!!

What are Steve and Jane to do? They’re the typical 50′s teens… all patriotic and basically good eggs with no desire to see their friends and neighbors eaten up by an alien monster even if the police and parents think it’s all just some goofy teen prank. There’s only one solution…. sneak out together and go all “Scooby Doo” with those same delinquents to find the space goo and save the town.

The Blob goes around doing… well… “Blob” stuff…. You know, eating up unsuspecting people, sneaking through tiny places and finally attacking the local theater during the Midnight Movie Fright show. Nothing seems to stop the thing…. not bullets… not acid… not fire. It’s only at the very end when our two plucky heroes get trapped in a diner that the thing’s Achilles heel is finally revealed. It can’t stand cold…. so the local fire department and police seize all the CO2 fire extinguishers they can lay their hands on and put it on ice till the army can show up and fly the critter to the arctic where… hopefully… it’ll stay frozen forever. A simple, pat ending… but ever so nice. Watching it again, I was tickled by the incredibly easy way that a local deputy was able to summon army units to thwart the alien menace… over the phone without any apparent difficulty!! Try that nowadays…. the paperwork wouldn’t even go through till the monster had taken over completely…. Ahhhh, the 1950′s… when monsters ran amok and the army was on alert against them 24/7. Gives you a warm fuzzy feeling of comfort and security. Hehehehe!!

At 82 minutes, “The Blob” doesn’t stray too far away from it’s simple story… but that’s OK. We never learn anything at all about it, but… you don’t really need to. I found this one a neat little movie… although grown up Miyuki did notice one thing that lil’ Miyuki never did. You never once actually see the Blob eat anybody! No kidding! It always happens just off screen, but somehow, the descriptions of people being… dissolved… was more than enough to give me shivers back then. Kudos for managing the difficult “less is more” approach to film making…. I truly never realized that way back then, and had always imagined that I had seen the goo eat people.

Not a great movie…. but one that has earned greatness through it’s longevity and fun original monster that has spawned a host of imitators since it first oozed across the screen, Neko gives “The Blob” a well deserved 4 “Meows” out of 5. While many other films made for far larger budgets fail, this one gives you every penny on screen, and is even done in wide screen and color…. Can’t beat that! Got a monster loving child in your life? Then you could do far worse things than to introduce them to this classic…. they’ll love it as much as I did.

Trailer? Of course there’s a Trailer…. and as an added bonus we get one for “Beware! The Blob!” as well…. Enjoy!!

Our quick synopsis goes like this here: “Demons have infested the earth. And only one warrior stands against them between the dark and the light: Saya, a 400-year-old half human-half vampire samurai girl who preys on those who feast on human blood.

Raised by a man named Kato, she works loosely with a shadowy society known as the Council while following her own personal quest to seek out Onigen, the original Mother of all Vampires. Saya is dispatched to an American military base at Yokota, where the vampires have infiltrated the base and are gathering their strength there for an evil purpose. Normally a loner, Saya forms an unlikely friendship with a young girl named Alice, daughter of the base commander, that she rescued from the undead. She finds that Onigen is finally close at hand and so now, after 400 years, Saya’s final hunt is about to begin.”

This one served as part two of my “Schoolgirl Horror Movie Theme Night”…. and I was hoping for a big smashing vampire stomping good time to end my evening… The anime it’s based on was great, if a wee bit short, so was this one going to answer all my expectations or was it gonna fail miserably? Guess if you want to know more you’ll just have to “Read On” and find out!!

There have been a lot of people weighing in with some fairly negative opinions on this one all over the internet just since it’s Korean theatrical release…. Your Favorite Catgirl’s never been one to listen to that sort of talk without realizing much of it always comes from detail obsessed anime fanboys all somehow upset that the movie they’ve waited for for a year or so deviated slightly from it’s original source….. Sigh... More negativity came along from those all bent out of shape about the idea of a Japanese girl being played by a Korean actress….. seems whenever some silly bigotry can rear it’s ugly head it will…. Sigh….. Ah, yes…. and then there’s the idea of Hollywood having the nerve to think they can get involved in the production of an Asian film at all…. Can’t most people just drop all this kind of goofiness and watch the movie first before dumping on it? I most certainly would like to give it a try.

It starts out pretty much as the anime did, with that sequence on the train…. where Saya chases down what seems to be an ordinary enough guy and slices him to bits with her trademark katana…. was he a bloodsucking monster or not? We never know here…. as the film immediately uses this scene merely to set up the tension between her and her two “handlers” in the mysterious “Council”, one who sort of pities the sad young/old vampire girl and the other who’d rather see her as dead as the bloodsuckers she hunts for them. It helps to establish the invisible wall that exists around Saya, separating her from the rest of humanity and making her forever the “Outsider”…. valuable, but never to be entirely trusted either.

You’ll probably be surprised to find at this point that the film is an entirely English dialog one… (Well… mostly, there are a few Japanese characters in a Flashback sequence that speak subtitled Japanese) even though it was made in Korea and originally premiered there theatrically. This worked out well for me, as it immediately made the film more accessible to my sweet Carolyn who dreads my subtitled films….. It didn’t take long for her to be as absorbed in the simple story as I was. That’ll be a plus for most Western audiences too.

Next Saya is sent to the US military base at Yokota, just as in the anime, to investigate and eliminate the vampires infesting the place. Here’s where the story starts to depart from it’s source. Once there in the guise of a simple schoolgirl, she has that battle you might remember from the anime with the blonde vampire spawn…. but this time it’s not a friendly school nurse that befriends her… instead it’s the young daughter of the base commander Alice who becomes that connection to the humanity Saya has lost over the long centuries of grim hunting and lonely wandering. The film actually does benefit from this, despite some reviewers assertions that Alice is an “unnecessary” character added only to bolster appeal for the US market. It’s an unfair assumption and misses the point of giving the audience a hook to get inside Saya’s secret need to somehow feel “normal” and to share the things humans take for granted. In the 45 minute anime, such ideas were unneeded…. but if you want to expand those ideas, this is where you’d inevitably have to go.

The character of Alice is the perennial “problem child” for her stern by the book father… always sneaking off base to party or otherwise rebel against his authority just to make him look bad to the military types around him. When she tells dad that the new Japanese student killed two of her classmates in a no holds barred sword duel to save her from them, he’s not going to believe it…. but he’s also not happy about the two suspicious “Men in Black” that follow Saya around on his base acting like they own the place either. They say they are CIA… but somehow the general knows that’s a line of crap….

It isn’t long before Alice goes all “Nancy Drew” on us and decides to follow her kendo teacher into town the next dark night…. She just knows he ordered the two girls to try to kill her… and darn it, she wants to find out why. Big ol’ mistake indeed!! He lets her catch up to him the the biggest vampire lair in the city, located in the seediest back alley bar in town. Revealing their true natures, the vampire proceed to have some fun hunting her through that maze of confusing streets…. until Saya arrives to spoil their fun. Here the film unleashes it’s CGI enhanced action at it’s fullest in a deliberately unrealistic fusion of superhero/anime/wuxia fighting that never seeks to look realistic…. much to many other reviewers dismay, but that’s the whole point!! I think you have to just accept that this is supposed to be the same wacky “Hercules & Xena Warrior Princess” style of fighting that made those two series so popular. It’s about how many crazy, gravity defying, blood spraying kills Saya can manage…. and less about the accurate style of Martial Arts the choreographer uses. This sequence wasn’t bad at all…. considering you didn’t want to spend a ridiculous amount of real time to train a Korean actress to become Jet Li just for one movie. The rapid cuts and editing work… yes, it makes the action slightly confusing to watch…. just as it would be if you actually witnessed a hundred or so crazed vampires pile on a sword swinging schoolgirl. Eventually, the kendo teacher tries to carry Alice away, leading us back to the base and another scene right from the anime as it tries in vain to escape Saya by hitching a ride on a cargo plane.

Meanwhile we see the arrival of the mysterious woman, Onigen, Saya’s eternal nemesis…. and one reeeaally creepy bitch. She shows up at a hotel and kills the owner with a show of mystic power simply out of bored spite at being annoyed by his killing of a spider. Saya finds out about her, but only as the rift between her handlers reaches it’s breaking point. The more junior of the two flexes his muscle by killing Alice’s father…. and then his own superior…. framing the whole thing on Saya so he can have the excuse he needs to eliminate her once and for all… Alice knows the truth, and goes on the run with Saya…. one step ahead of the military, the Council, and coming inexorably closer to Onigen and the truth behind her father’s death all those centuries ago.

The girls eventually duel the one eyed vampire ninja underling of Onigen, and although Saya gets badly wounded, is saved by Alice, who listens to her tale of that time sooo sooo long ago when her family and foster father were killed, setting her on the road of vengeance. We get a flashback sequence… to feudal Japan full of evil vampire ninjas, and Saya’s foster dad, a hermit yamabushi who taught her the ways of the sword before dying while saving her from them. I wish more time had been lavished here… as the story seems incomplete without seeing Saya’s real father… but I suppose that’s necessary given the twist that’s needed for the ending of this one. Yep…. it’s “Spoiler Alert” time here…. for I can’t really weigh in on the ending without giving that secret away.

Seems that the mom Saya’s never known is actually Onigen herself… and it’s her Mom who killed her father and has manipulated everything simply to hone Saya into a deadly weapon capable of succeeding her as the new Queen of Vampires…. but by this point you sorta guessed that one anyway. There’s a final duel of course…. another big effects laden fight in which Saya must defeat her evil mom and still maintain the core of humanity that she keeps hidden away from the world. It’s not a bad fight… but I had really expected a bit more of one. Something to rival the finale of “Azumi”, say, with Saya battling hordes of demons summoned as a final test by her ultra powerful mother before squaring off against her. But we don’t get that sadly…… a missed opportunity I think. Afterward… Alice returns home to the military base…. giving that taped interview you remember from the anime, while Saya disappears again, wandering away again in search of those vampires who still hide among the multitudes of the world….(and setting up the possibility for “Blood 2″ if this one is successful at the box office…)

So…. Your Favorite Catgirl liked this one overall, despite some minor quibbles, and although it isn’t the big blockbuster film many had hoped for, it does a good job of moving the anime to the live screen, always a hard transition under the best of circumstances. Korean actress Jun Ji-hyun aka Gianna Jun does a very nice job as Saya, and I can’t really find fault with any of the other actors here either….. Carolyn liked it…. and that alone is rare praise indeed given that very few films she enjoys have any vampires or swordfighting schoolgirls in them at all… Hehehehe!! So, in conclusion, I can give “Blood, The Last Vampire” a respectable 3 “Meows” out of 5 and can recommend it to those who like this sort of Western/ Asian hybrid action film. Most fans of feisty Japanese schoolgirls will probably be happy with it too. If you haven’t seen the theatrical release yet, definitely give the DVD a look when it becomes available in your neck of the woods.

With a big budget film like this one, you just know there’s gonna be a Trailer… but in case you missed it, here it is again for your viewing pleasure.

Our synopsis reads: “Upon discovering his fiance Tollea (played by Maria Montez) has been kidnapped, Ramu (played by Jon Hall) and his friend Kado (played by Sabu) set out for a Pacific isle where all strangers are to be killed on arrival and the inhabitants, who are frequently sacrificed to an angry volcano god, worship the cobra. The island is ruled over by Tollea’s evil twin Naja (again… Maria Montez), the “Cobra Woman”, who, besides having designs on her handsome new prisoner Ramu, also desires to eliminate any romantic competition from her sister.”

Oooohhh!! Identical twins! You just know with a tried and true plot element like this that we’re in for some nifty “mistaken identity” fun….. and with a fanatical island of snake worshipping natives and a volcano god needing some virgin sacrifice this one’s got classic pulp goodness written all over it.

So…. having whetted your appetite for classic old school pulp adventure let’s dive in and see if the years have been kind to my memories of this one, shall we?

So…. this one is by Universal Pictures during the heyday of their classic horror films and features the star of the great “Thief of Bagdad” and “The Jungle Book”, Sabu….. C’mon…. you remember Sabu…. the  turbaned inspiration for lil’ Hadji in those nifty ol’ “Johnny Quest” cartoons of the 60′s….Add Jon Hall and the exotic Maria Montez and even Lon Chaney Jr., spend the big bucks for Technicolor and you must have the recipe for a winner of a film, right? Well, maybe you do…… but then again, maybe not….

This one is directed by Robert Siodmak, who did some excellent Film Noir pieces, along with some really craptacular stuff in his early career, but there is just so much even a great director can do with material of this nature. Luckily…. lil’ Miyuki was easily entertained by the exotic, the wild, and the implausible….. so “Cobra Woman” was right up her alley.

It all starts off with the beautiful Tollea (Maria Montez) poised to marry the love of her life, Ramu (Jon Hall). Before this can happen, she gets kidnapped by Hava, the mute servant of her grandmother, the queen of the Cobra people (Mary Nash). Seems she’s actually the rightful heir to the position of High Priestess…. but was hidden away as a child because she failed to be immune to the deadly poison of the King Cobra. In her absence, the title of High Priestess has been in the hands of her equally gorgeous twin sister Naja…. but Naja it seems, is completely evil…. crazy, megalomaniacally evil and has taken to torturing and killing those among her subjects who oppose her in her bid to rule Cobra Island with an iron fist.

Tollea’s grandmother wants her to depose her sister and her equally villainous confederate Martok (played by Edgar Barrier) and return the island to it’s peaceful idyllic lifestyle…. but that’s just not gonna happen without a fight… you just know that. Luckily Ramu and his little buddy Kado find out all about Tollea from her “father” MacDonald, the Scotsman who raised her ever since he was unlucky enough to get shipwrecked on mysterious Cobra Island all those years ago. Captured by the natives, he had been tortured and sentanced to death, but then awoke back on his ship far out to sea. How he managed to escape was unknown to him… even stranger was that he had baby Tollea with him. He had raised her since that day as his very own daughter despite her mysterious appearance in his life. (How that ended up creating a beautiful white girl raised by a Scotsman somewhere in India who speaks English with a thick Mexican accent completely slipped by lil’ Miyuki at the time, but does feel a bit weird to me watching it again after all these years…. but we’ll skip over that…. sometimes you just gotta let these things go… Hehehe!!)

Anyway…. Ramu and Kado get to Cobra Island and almost immediately get into trouble. Ramu gets captured by Naja’s guards and they plan to add him to the annual human sacrifice made to the island’s active volcano. Luckily,he escapes from prison while being interrogated by Martok, Naja’s priest and corrupt adviser. Naturally, in true pulp adventure fashion he has to run into Naja and then mistake her for his beloved Tollea (That ALWAYS happens when you use the “twins” plotline…. and I mean ALWAYS….) Of course, the evil Naja quickly falls in love with him. Yep…. had to happen, it’s a rule or something…

Eventually our thick headed hero figures out what the heck is going on and who is who but not before spilling the beans to Naja that her sister has been returned to the island by those plotting to remove her from power. Naja promises Ramu that she will let Tollea leave the island in safety if he agrees to stay behind with her and become her lover (Boooo!! Hisss!!). Kado, in the meantime, gets himself caught after he mistakenly frees the villainous Martok. Refusing to divulge the locations of Ramu and Tollea, Kado gets himself tortured by Martok until he is rescued by Hava and Coco, a chimpanzee. (See…. they had to squeeze a lovable monkey in here somewheres…. otherwise Sabu would get lonely….Hehehehe!!)

Then the old Queen tries to end the trouble by asking Naja to abdicate her crown in favor of her sister for the good of all the island’s people, but the wicked Naja refuses her and sets her men to hunting for Tollea, Ramu and Kado. Later that night, the queen is murdered by Martok when she refuses to reveal Tollea’s whereabouts to him instead of Naja, but manages to lay a terrible curse upon him before expiring. Whoops!! Guess he’s in for it…. The very next morning, Ramu and Kado get captured by Naja’s guards, so Tollea finally goes to the royal castle to confronts her wicked sister. She plays her trump card, and demands as the first born daughter of their mother, to take her rightful place as High Priestess. Not one to give up easily…. Naja then tries to kill her sister, but is killed herself when she falls out one of the castle’s windows while attempting to throw a spear.

The evil Naja finally dead, Tollea takes her place and orders a stop to the executions of Ramu and Kado. Realizing who she is, Martok demands that Tollea perform the priestess’s deadly cobra dance. Deadly Cobra Dance? That just doesn’t sound good….. Apparently the ancient island gods agree because then the Queen’s death curse strikes as the volcano erupts with all the fun and apocalyptic action you’d expect from such an event.During the eruption, the queen’s servant, Hava, takes revenge for her mistress and kills Martok. With the evil priest’s death, the volcanic eruption stops and the Cobra people are finally freed to return to their formerly peaceful existence. Ramu and Kado then leave the island, but Tollea stows away on their boat and begs Ramu to return to Cobra Island with her, stating, “Thy people shall be my people. Awwwwwww… soooo sweet! Love really does conquer all…..

Neko managed to watch this one on the recent French Region 2 PAL release and even though it’s an old film, the print still looks good after all these years…. there’s definitely something about Technicolor that gives one of the films a certain “look” that you just don’t get from modern color film. So…. is it a great film? Is it even a good one? Hmmmmm? With the almost pulp serial plotline and soap opera evil twins and the terrible acting and script, Neko would have to say that “Cobra Woman” is certainly never going to be regarded as a particularly great cinematic epic, but even still…. if you liked this one as a kid, and I really, really did, you’ll probably still dig it’s crazy plot even now. Neko gives it her 3 “Meows” out of 5 for being a neat little movie gem that somehow got stuck in my head and still gives me a chuckle even after all these years.

Trailers? Oh yeah… we got that covered. Enjoy!