I often tell people I see more old movies in theaters than new ones, and nights like Saturday confirm this. As I’ve noted before, I have a friend at the library who works with John from Time Tunnel Toys. They put on a monthly show at Chicago’s lovely refurbished Portage Theater.
This month they had a bonus matinee, Bert I. Gordon’s wonderfully cheesy fantasy adventure The Magic Sword. However, between that and the main slate that night was an R rated independent movie called Dyer’s Eve that I really didn’t have any interest in seeing. (Plus, I’ve seen Magic Sword a few times in the last couple of years, including at B-Fest.) I appreciate the guys trying to mix things up by including independent films, but I have to say, it doesn’t make any sense sticking an R rated shot on video movie between four ‘G’ rated classic monster movies playing to the nostalgia crowd.
Anyway, I showed up about 6:00 for the 6:30 showing of The Mole People. The Time Tunnel guys have a deal going with Universal now, which will allow them to forgo showing public domain films and such. In a moment both pleasing and embarrassing, I think I was the first one in the audience to realize (about twenty seconds in), that they had started showing Tarantula instead of The Mole People. In any case, I was the one who first run up to the lobby to apprise them of this fact. A few minutes later, the right movie was showing.
Mole People is obviously ‘inspired’ by Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon. The inevitable John Agar leads a team of archeologists (who look at Egyptian Hieroglyphics and dub them Sumerian) up a mountain. Naturally they fall inside a big cavern that leads to an underground ancient city of lost Sumerians. Luckily, everyone in the expedition speaks the dead language Sumerian fluently, so there aren’t any translation problems, or even language drift for the Sumerian decendants who have lived thousands of years underground.
Agar naturally falls in love with the one non-albino (generations with no sun, you see), who is therefore a “marked one” and yet allowed to live despite the fact that the rulers regularly execute excess members of the population to keep things at a sustainable 180 people, or something like that. Oddly, the albinos all have dark hair while the non-albino chick is, of course, a blonde.
The mole people are underground man-like creatures (or more aptly, man in rubber suit-like creatures) who have gigantic eyes, just like moles do. They are oppressed by the Sumerians, and he man Agar seeks to free them, and in the end, as you’d expect, everything is destroyed by either a natural disaster or angry gods.
Great stuff. The opening with a SCIENTIST (who can’t keep his hands still) expounding on Inner Earth theories is pretty hilarious.
Movie two was Revenge of the Creature, the second of the three Creature of the Black Lagoon movies. John Agar is again the lead, and Nestor Paiva returns as the boat captain from the first movie. Paiva had also appeared with Agar in The Mole People, so you definitely had that stock company vibe going. Revenge is a pretty standard but highly fun monster movie, and really, any chance you can get to see the Creature is a good one.
The last movie moved back in time, 1935’s Werewolf of London. This introduced the trope that werewolves changed under the full moon, but most of the remaining “traditional lore” for werewolves (such as the silver thing) wouldn’t be made up out of whole cloth until 1941’s The Wolf Man. As you’d expect from a film made in the mid-’30s, this one’s a bit stagy, but very nice stuff to see on a big screen. Star Henry Hull didn’t want a full face covering make-up, so his werewolf is rather less hirsute than Chaney Jr.’s would be.
Lots of fun stuff here, from the appearance of Warner “Charlie Chan” Oland as the fellow sufferer who inflicts the curse of “werewolfry” or “lycanphobia” (!) on Hull. There are various weird sci-fi flourishes, and some simply appallingly bad comic relief from a pair of old Cockney women sots. Otherwise, Hull’s werewolf is a lot more like Mr. Hyde than the Larry Talbot model.
July will be a big movie month for me. This week I’ll see four giant monster movies across the street at the historic Pickwick Theater, courtesy of G-Fest. Then it’s down to Texas for T-Fest and several additional days of movie watching at the abode of Kirk and Patty Draut and Chez (Sandy) Petersen, then back to Chicago for the July 25th Portage slate, which is one of the best so far: Deadly Mantis, the delirious Monster on the Campus and Hammer’s Curse of the Werewolf.
All for $10, folks. I hope some of you can make it.
