Monster of the Day #1924

Updated on May 13, 2019 By Ken Begg 10 Comments

The third slot was given to GalaxyJane in honor of her birthday, and she choose Abby. For some reason (maybe made by a small film company that would out of business and the master print was destroyed?), there’s no decent print of the movie, which seems weird for something made in 1974. This was a William Girdler movie, and it’s a bit rough (although I’m sure it was made on a tiny budget), but it’s still very solid, and hey, William Marshall! Girdler, of course, continued to grow as a director until he made the fantastic fun flick The Manitou, because dying in a helicopter crash whilst scouting his next film.

Abby was not forgotten, however, as it was parodied in I’m Gonna Get You Sucka!

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  • Beckoning Chasm

    Hulkette smash!

  • bgbear_rnh

    Wow man, like what if we were all green like Martians, there would be no racism.

  • Flangepart

    Drat, beat me to it…
    Not that we all wouldn’t think of it…

  • Eric Hinkle

    Was this the Blaxploitation flick inspired by ‘The Exorcist’?

  • bgbear_rnh

    Or the Jolly Green Giant ;-D

  • Rock Baker

    Girdler’s story is one of the most tragic of his field. He was really on his way after a slow start in very cheap pictures. The one-two punch of GRIZZLY and SOMETHING IS OUT THERE (aka DAY OF THE ANIMALS) secured him a footing from which he was on the cusp of the big-time. Those two films offer a fine legacy (GRIZZLY demonstrating a solid emotional experience and OUT THERE a testament to his technical abilities), but one can’t help but wonder what heights he was to reach had the unthinkable not happened.

  • Eric Hinkle

    I have to say, I think GRIZZLY and DAY OF THE ANIMALS are both kinda goofy movies (the human characters in the latter are almost mind-bogglingly stupid), but for all that I enjoy both films. Even if they weren’t the best movies made they were at least fun to watch, and both
    have some genuine scares.

    It is a shame to hear that Mr. Girdler died the way he did, though.

  • Supposedly the prints were destroyed as a result of the lawsuit for ripping off The Exorcist. Except the lawsuit was (probably, the reported details are contradictory) settled in Girdler’s favor about the time of his death, so who knows. By then any possibleinterest in Exorcist clones had waned so it is altogether possible that they were simply junked as surplus to requirements in a market that had not yet anticipated that the home video market was about to take off.

    I would dearly love to see the world’s WHITEST African-American Discotheque in its original eye-bleeding glory and so I hold out hope that a 35mm print is out there somewhere waiting to be found by someone who will appreciate the value of what they have.

  • Wade Harrell

    It was fun (if disconcerting) to see Leslie Nielson as a villain, and a really jerky and sick one at that!

  • Eric Hinkle

    I did enjoy seeing his character get taken out by Not-so-Gentle Ben.

    At the same time he reminded me of Mister Begg’s remarks about the white guy who argued with the black guy in Romero’s ‘Night of the Living Dead’. The Nielson character was a jerk, but every criticism he made of the hero’s actions in DotA was correct. If the hikers had listened to him, more of them would have escaped alive.