JABOOTU the bad movie dimension

Sting of Death (1965) Part 2

Click here for Part 1 of this review!

Apparently afraid someone in the audience might find this peculiar—not to mention utterly retarded—they have one girl say, “I thought I saw something in the pool!”  Somehow even this remark fails to get anyone to discern what is basically a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.* This lack of discernment is supposedly ‘explained’ when someone replies, “All you need is some more beer!”

[*Thank you, Raymond Chandler.]

“I’ll settle for music,” the almost observant damsel decrees.  Unfortunately, the phonograph record selected instead inexplicably plays Neil Sedaka’s (!) immortal dance tune, “The Jellyfish.”  This leads to a fit of ‘help, I’ve got ravenous fire ants down my shirt’ writhing that makes the group’s last bout of contortions look like something Gene Kelly choreographed.  If nothing else, it answers the question of what you’d see on a TV show entitled, “So You Think You Can Dance…Because You Really, Really Can’t.”

No words I can muster could pay proper homage to the inexorable horrors we are now privy to.  Hell, the pen of William Shakespeare would prove insufficient.  (On the other hand, H.P. Lovecraft might get the job done.)  Luckily—well, not for you reading this—I don’t have to demonstrate my manifold literary inadequacy, since some kind (?) soul on YouTube has provided the following:

I’m assuming this is Sedaka’s most embarrassing cinema moment.  However, a few years later he did take a major supporting role in 1968’s Playgirl Killer.  Sedaka never acted again after that, so take it for what it’s worth.  Meanwhile, Playgirl Killer was written by the Kerwin Brothers.  One of them, William Kerwin, also played the lead.  However, a few years earlier his brother Harry worked make-up on…Sting of Death.  So presumably they were the guys who got Sedaka to sing “The Jellyfish.”

In case you’re wondering, the lyrics of the song really DO go, “Wella / I saya fella / get your Cinderella / and do the jella / the jilla jalla jella / it’s really swella / to do the jella jellyfish / Hey! / Monkey! / Don’t be a donkey / it’s nothing like The Monkey! / It isn’t funky / or anything that’s junky! / it’s something swella / the jilla jalla jellyfish.”

Meanwhile, in an auteurial tour de force Grefé mixes things up with (female) crotch and boob shots as well as butt shots. In service of these, one singularly accommodating young lady helpfully leans her bikini-clad cleavage right into the camera.

At one point during this we see the Monster’s arm start emerging from the pool (not that anybody notices), as if he’s ready to leap out and attack.  And really, who can blame him? However, he sinks back below when Richardson makes an appearance, presumably because of the latter’s highly unfortunate blue shorts.  These aren’t short-shorts, but seriously, anyone with legs like that should be legally required to wear long pants at all times, including in the shower.

When the horrors of the song and dancing are finally behind us, Grefé wisely offers some comic relief:  Louise (dark redhead) jumps into the pool—unbelievably, no one joins her—and is summarily kacked by the yet mysteriously undetected Monster.  Ha, ha!, that breaks the tension, all right.  I mean, when the last thing Louise says before jumping into the pool is, “I’m on vacation; let’s live!”, or when Karen shortly after laughs, “you nut, you’ll kill yourself!” (while swimming languidly in a backyard pool?????), or when Richardson adds, “let her be, Karen, I guess she’ll survive,” well, that all can’t seriously be meant to evoke dramatic irony.  Can it?

By the way, if you thought it was improbable *cough*impossible*cough* that none of the nearly twenty people standing poolside saw the Monster swimming around in there, the idea that Louise never sees him while swimming around for several minutes in the exact same pool is just downright insulting.  And the idea that nobody even notices her being attacked all of ten feet away…yeesh!

Anyway, Louise ends up with venom smeared all over her face.  The others then finally see the Monster when he emerges from the pool and begins walking in their direction.  He grabs another guy’s face as the rest scatter, and then slowly ambles off.  All the while, the film kept the Monster’s head out of our field of vision.  You just know this obvious build-up to a supposedly big monster reveal is writing a check the film can’t remotely hope to cash.

The gasping, writhing victims are laid down by the pool.  Then Richardson appears wearing completely different clothes than he had on twenty seconds ago.  He indeed had a line about changing into dry clothes; the problem is that the clothes he was wearing were already entirely dry.  And why would he change out of a ‘wet’ pair swim trunks into another pair of swim trunks?  Especially with legs like that?

”The fools!  I told them to stay out of the pool for an hour after they had eaten!”

Richardson has Karen fetch his doctor’s bag, which of course he’d have as a marine biologist.  This is, after all, the guy who told the Sheriff, “I’m not a pathologist; biology is my line.”  However, the make-up jobs on the victims keep getting more elaborate, so presumably they’re done for.  ‘I’m sure to get sued for this,’ we can imagine Richardson saying.  ‘Karen, go get my attorney’s briefcase.’

Meanwhile, John returns with dire news, reporting that the two-way radio’s been smashed.  He tells Young People Leader to get his charges on their boat and take the victims back to the mainland.  There he should contact the Sheriff from the hospital and send him out to the island.  (Doesn’t the boat have a radio?)

Leader Guy asks if Richardson wants them to take along Karen and the rest of her friends.  Richardson decides no.  Nobody bothers to ask the girls their opinion on the matter, but then, why should they when there are men around to decide?  Anyway, they’ll be safe here, Richardson avers. “We have guns.”

Sadly, the Young People’s attempt to flee is doomed by the fact that the Monster is under their boat with a little hatchet.  This might seem like an insufficient tool with which to sink a cabin cruiser.  However, since the craft’s hull appears to be made out of Silly Putty when he starts hacking at it, I guess not.

This all leads to the film’s gut-busting comedy highlight. The boat cruises off at top speed, but eventually begins to sink.  To the Young People’s collective horror—and our agog mirth—they find the boat surrounded by swarms of ‘jellyfish’ fashioned from party balloons wrapped in cellophane.  Remember that classic scene in Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster where Bela Lugosi wrapped the inert tentacles of a giant rubber octopus around himself to simulate being attacked?  Well, he had nothing on these poor schlubs, who are forced to tread water while holding the balloons against various parts of their bodies and screaming themselves raw to suggest a mass jellyfish assault.

I want to be fair, though.  Yes, even in 1965 the ‘special’ effects here must have been considered laughable.  However, it’s quite possible that many drive-in theater patrons were completely awestruck by what was, for the time, some incredible carnage.  Something like fifteen people must go in the drink here and suffer their horrible demise, and chances are that even veteran trash movie fans of that era had never seen slaughter on such a scale before.

Say what you will, but within his sizable limitations, Grefé was really delivering the goods here.  Indeed, the scene is so violent for an American film of this vintage—at least in concept, if not in execution—that it’s quite possible that better effects and more able direction would have forced them to cut the scene down somewhat.* Even granting all that, though, the inability of the swimmers to elude the patently immobile ‘jellyfish’ still inspires more than a few chuckles.  Here’s an idea, gang:  Swim for shore.

[*All this changed but a couple of years later, when stuff like George Romero’s far more gruesome Night of the Living Dead started playing theaters.]

Now, as I’ve noted, this scene is a lot more exciting in the abstract than in the shoddy, flaky concrete.  Even so, hopefully Grefé learned something from this as his career continued.  The main problem is that this is clearly the film’s ‘big scene,’ but that it takes place with more than half the movie left to run.  Unsurprisingly, this is counterproductive to maintaining audience interest.  Especially since the rest of the movie, sadly, proves to be the second half of Sting of Death.

Although Grefé wasn’t exactly a novice, having previously directed two films, he was still early in his career.  Moreover, unlike his previous films, he was merely hired to direct this one by producer Joseph Fink.  As such, he didn’t write the movie’s script, as he tended to do with his other pictures.

Given this, you can’t really blame Grefé for the film’s structural deficiencies, which are severe.  One thing I’ve learn over the years is that the first third or half of a film generally ends up inspiring the majority of my review of it.  This is because of all the set-up involved; establishing setting, plot, characters and their motivations, etc.  Once you get past all that, you start getting more action-y sorts of scenes as the film advances (or in the case of most movies featured here, staggers) towards its climax.  Unsurprisingly, scenes like that don’t merit as much commentary as the stage-setting stuff.

Sting of Death is way beyond normal in this regard.  As silly as the first half of the film is, the viewer is at least kept marginally involved in meeting everyone, watching the dance numbers—highlighted, of course, by Sedaka’s contribution to the picture—and watching the movie’s most outré sequence.

Sadly, the rest of the film largely consists of various set pieces that, yes, just mark time until the film’s conclusion.Since he worked off of someone else’s script here, these problems can’t be laid at Grefé’s feet.  (On the other hand, he didn’t exactly salvage things with his vivid directorial élan, either.)

However, he did write his next excursion into horror, 1967’s Death Curse of Tartu.  And that film is throughout about as dull and meandering as the second half of this one.  It’s like Grefé was developing a process called ‘Bore-o-Rama’ during Sting of Death, and had perfected it by the time of Tartu.

In any case, let the slog begin.  We cut back to the Richardson abode.  My mouth actually dropped when I observed that Richardson had in fact kept the ailing Louise behind (!!!).   I don’t think they made a secret of this, but it could be that this picture has not always commanded my full attention.

Louise’s continued presence is presumably because, as marine biologist Richardson earlier opined, she wasn’t quite as badly mauled or as severely poisoned as the Monster’s other victim.  I mean, you can’t send everyone to the hospital.  Meanwhile, he gives her a hypodermic sedative to stop her incessant screaming.  “She’s more frightened than anything else,” he lamely asserts.  I guess that explains the horribly vivid ‘fear welts’ all over her face.

Then, making sure the girls are safely distracted, he hands John a revolver.  Richardson and John continue to treat the girls like they’re absolutely incapable of taking action on their own.  This is especially irksome in that they are themselves, to be frank, massive clods. Richardson then leaves to work on the damaged radio, and John moves closer to the camera so the camera shot can focus on the gun.  This makes sense, at least in terms of this movie, because the gun never once comes into play at any point in the rest of the proceedings.

Then we cut to a montage of all the kids’ dead bodies floating around.  Because the attack scene itself wasn’t all that that well executed, this dwelling on the numerous corpses is actually more affecting.  This is true despite that fact that the shots are accompanied by ineptly ponderous funereal music.  Dwelling on the death toll in silence would have easily given the scene a much bigger kick.

Here we get our big reveal in which we learn that—SPOILER ALERT!!!—Egon is our monster.  Boy, there’s a shock.  They sure skillfully diverted our attention from that possibility.  He enters what appears to be a small *cough* cave featuring one of your standard Ten Dollar Super Science Control Panels—radio dials to twist, lighted section that blinks, an arc generator—and activates it.

He then walks over to a nearby fish tank.  Here he apparently removes from his head a huge jellyfish that he had been wearing like a hat (or a helmet, more accurately).  I think.  Luckily we’ll see this process in much greater detail later, which will leave me…actually, entirely more confused about what the hell is supposed to be going on here.
Cut to Richardson and guests having dinner, with everyone having changed into nice clothes for the event.  Yeah, boy, a dinner scene.  That’s the way to ratchet up the tension.  And if it was meant to offer the audience a respite from the high tension that already existed, well, it would have been nice if they had provided any.

They yak a bit, although mostly just to run over stuff that’s already happened.  Richardson mentions that he’s planning to go fetch Egon the next day.  Oh, and since he’ll be out and about, he’ll also bring the scuba gear and do some diving.  Jessica asks if she go with.  “Karen’s told me how beautiful the reefs are,” she explains.

Thus do we enter this extremely weird part of the movie where everyone acts like they have no idea that there’s a murderous monster running around.  I mean, Louise was attacked in Richardson’s swimming pool, with a crowd surrounding it.  Even so, Jessica decides heading out into the wild is a grand idea.  Indeed, Donna asks to join them too.  Richardson agrees, and then sends the girls to bed.  Because, you know, they’re all like 12 years old, right?

Having gotten past My Dinner with Richardson, we now pause for a romantic interlude between our young leads.  This is set against a window they are spraying with a hose, which is meant to indicate that it’s raining.  “It fits our mood,” John glums.   However, Eros will not be denied.  “Is it possible to fall in love with all this happening?” Karen ponders.  I wouldn’t dream of blowing the shock answer for you, but it’s yes.

By the way, Grefé apparently told the actors to whisper their lines here, presumably in an attempt to communicate intimacy.  I see what he was going for, but the sound is so bad that you can barely make out what they’re saying.  Which, OK, isn’t really impacting our enjoyment or interest level any.  So there’s that.  Anyhoo, they kiss and…scene.

Apparently Grefé worried we’d be reeling from the action-packed dinner and young lovers scenes.  And so we know cut to Richardson, John, Donna and Jessica embarking the next morning on an air boat.  That’s right, both men are leaving three of the girls alone, one of which is the ailing Louise, and leaving them behind where the original attack occurred.  This should not be taken as of a sign of their trust in Karen and Susan, however.  (For instance, they don’t leave a gun behind.)  No, it’s because Richardson and John are both morons.

However, who can ponder such things in light of the raw excitement promised by the air boat?  I wish particularly to mention Donna, who prepared for the expedition by sensibly wearing a white, mid-thigh white dress.  They head out, and there now follows over a minute straight of them plying their air boat through the swamps.  This scene is made even more pulse-pounding by the musical accompaniment, apparently taken from an album entitled, “Music to Sleep By.”  I’m just sorry you can’t see it for yourself.

Stare at this image for a minute straight to simulate the awesome excitement of Sting of Death.

Arriving near the dilapidated shack Egon calls home, they disembark, walk around a bit, and then enter it.  It really is a ramshackle hovel.  The furnishings, such as they are, are all Early American Hillbilly Garage Sale.  The most impressive artifacts on display, and by quite some bit, are a fish tank and a kerosene lamp.  “Amazing!” Donna avers upon seeing this splendor.  “All of this, out in the middle of the Everglades!”  Yeah, like stumbling on the Lost City of El Dorado, isn’t it?

”We’ve done it!  We’ve found Blofeld’s secret volcano base!”

When Jessica rather more realistically dubs it “creepy,” John again nobly comes to his associate’s defense.  “Well,” he shrugs, “[Egon] likes it well enough.”  Sure, why wouldn’t he? He’s got rough skin on half his face!  He’s lucky to live in anything better than a refrigerator box.  Meanwhile, John nonchalantly picks up and glances through what are apparently Egon’s notes regarding his private research.  Hey, a guy like that should be proud that a hunky dude like John evinces even that much interest in his work!

Donna, who is apparently our designated Cute Dumb Chick, looks at some inflated plastic bags, er, jellyfish in the aforementioned home aquarium.  Richardson answers that they’re “phacelia,” because he’s a man and a scientist and should never skip an opportunity to condescend to a girl.  I mean, why bother to educate yourself if you’re just going to use words like ‘jellyfish.’

Jessica, being a diver, is rather more on the ball, however.  Calling Donna “silly,’ she accurately identifies them as Portuguese Men o’ War.  “Some people call them jellyfish,” she continues.  Sure, the rabble, maybe.  Anyway, Jessica’s almost smug enough to be a marine biologist herself.  Too bad she’s a girl!

Richardson wanders off to find Egon, and suddenly the movie gets entirely stupider.  Yes, really.  “I left my cigarettes in the boat,” Donna says.  “Be right back!”  Neither Jessica nor John even say anything as she leaves.  This is less than one day since the Monster attacked them about 20 people congregated in the Richardon’s backyard and nearly killed two of them.  Of course, the remaining characters don’t know about the ill-fated boat trip that later killed everyone else.  Even so, you’d think someone would say, “Gee, I’m not sure that’s such a great idea,” or at least, “OK, I’ll go with you.”

Now we get a long sequence were Donna wanders around without, predictably, a thought in her head, and is stalked by the Jellyfish Monster.  This goes on for a good long while.  She pauses to pick up a plant frond (I assume the script called for her to pick up some flowers, but they couldn’t find any in evidence).  She literally twirls around as she looks up at a stock footage bird flying overhead—the things you see in the wilderness!  And so on.

During this the Jellyfish Monster is often trailing about ten feet behind her and completely out in the open, but she never notices.  Perhaps this is why they spent so much time established Egon’s ninja-like ability to sneak up on people.

And so they eat up another whole minute of ‘running’ time before she reaches the boat.  Eventually, the Jellyfish Monster gets so close to her—about three feet away and standing almost directly in front of her—that even Donna notices him.  She screams, and—yes—stumbles away from her tormentor.  She backs into brackish water through which she will scream and stumble away for another good long while before he finally kacks her.

Yeah, you might want to stick with those shots of just his flippers.

We cut briefly away from this awesome jellyfish and mouse sequences as Donna screams for the first time. We return to Jessica and John sitting in Egon’s, er, living room and flipping through some magazines.  Jessica looks up for about half a second, but returns her attention to the magazine even before she finishes saying, “What was that?”  John isn’t even that responsive.  Indeed, he doesn’t even acknowledge that Jessica, sitting right next to him, has said anything.  I mean, if these people don’t care that they’re in a horror movie, why should I?

Back to Donna for the pursuit and eventual kacking, all seen from a Monster POV perspective.  This goes on for a while, and by the time of Donna’s demise (which predictably occurs off-camera), we’ve ticked off another three minutes of screentime.  This might not sound like much, but count to 180 while imagining absolutely nothing of interest and you’ll likely discover that it seems like a very long time indeed.

Richardson reenters the room (well, actually, he reenters shot—he never really left), and suddenly Donna’s screams are heard a lot more clearly.  This is sort of weird, given that she was much further away from the shack in the end than she was when she started screaming.  “What was that?” Donna repeats.  Once more proving his awesome Hero credentials, John answers, “What was what?”

“It sounds like a scream,” a mystified Jessica replies.  “Where’s Donna?” Richardson asks, because as a Scientist! he’s a trained observer and able to put all these bewildering pieces together.  “Oh, my god!” John says, jumping up.  Quick on the uptake, isn’t he?  They run right outside the shack, stop there and call for her, but to no avail.  Probably because, you know, she’s dead and all.

This intensive search technique is utilized for a good, oh, four seconds before they abandon it.  “Let’s get the air boat,” Richardson commands.  “We’ll use it to check the lake area!”  So they run back to the boat for more AWESOME AIR BOAT ACTION!  Woo-wheee!  Luckily, the Everglades are really small and they spot Donna’s bandana in a minute or two.

Actually, watching the scene more carefully—the things I do for you people—nobody mentions the bandana.  However, Jessica points as the boat cruises through and shouts, “Look, bubbles!”  Richardson agrees.  “She must be right below!” he concurs.  Yes, this is the only possible explanation for bubbles appearing on the surface of marsh water.

And so they don their scuba tanks to conduct a search.  Oh, boy, if there’s one thing even more intrinsically fascinating to watch than folks tooling around in an air boat for minutes on end, it’s people scuba diving for minutes on end!  Sea Hunt, you are avenged!

They jump into the murky waters, which again are utterly clear below, and, well, scuba around.  Eventually, though, Jessica gets distracted by some pretty fish—THIS REALLY HAPPENS—and swims off on her own.  The Jellyfish Monster appears and gets her.  Some time after this, the guys—who, I would remind you, are down here searching for another girl they let wander off to her doom—finally notice that, hey, where’s Jessica?

Oh, and they run out of air, because apparently scuba tanks only allow for like three minutes of diving time. (Not that I’m complaining about that!)  John, being manly, then heads back down to “free dive”, which is what we layman call swimming around without a scuba tank.

Back to the house.  Karen is all het up because the others aren’t back yet.  Susan, for her part, is basically played as a block of wood.  She decides to take a shower.  Because, you know, who’d want to stay together in a situation like this? Not to mention that they’re in another part of the house completely from the ailing Louise.  But hey, she’s not the boss of them.

Well, those guilty of the sin of personal hygiene must be punished, of course, so that’s the end for Susan.  This is confirmed a) she *gasps* strips for the shower, because even though the camera stays on her face during this, we’re shockingly aware that she’s, like, naked, and besides, we do see her in her slip, and b) there are a few shots where we’re briefly allowed to semi-see her butt through the marbled glass shower door.  So, you know, she’s kind of a whore.

The justice of her demise established, we get some stalking flipper shots coming down the hallway, and then she’s attacked in the shower.  (By the way, the water clearly isn’t really on, she just mimes being under it.)  This is presumably meant to evoke Psycho, made just five years earlier.  However, the scene is saved to some extent by being entirely too ineptly filmed to really ape Hitchcock very much.  To be fair, though, Grefé was filming in a real bathroom, so there’s only so many places he could put the camera.

”OK, I think I found what was clogging your drain.”

Still, this is one of the more graphic kills, as Susan is actually attacked on camera and gets some barbecue sauce venom slathered on her face and neck as the Monster strangles hand.  Exit Susan.  She screams quite a lot before she goes, but naturally Karen doesn’t hear this.

Three thoughts jumble together in quick response to this.  First, man, this universe has the worst acoustics.  Second, how big is this house that Karen can’t hear her friend screaming like that?  Third, since the shower is right down the hall from the room Louise in, that means that if Louise had started shrieking for help or in pain or something, they wouldn’t have heard her either.  It’s good to have friends watching over you.

Karen is recumbent on the cough downstairs, and *gasp* she’s approached by a looming shadow of a figure menacingly holding his arms over its head.  However, it turns out to be the returning John.  (!!)  Maybe he was drying his armpits.  Chagrined, he and Richardson tell Karen they lost Jessica and Donna.

“Right now we’re going to get Susan and Louise and take them to the mainland,” Richardson decides.  That’s right, this is something they could have done yesterday.  “It’s not safe on the island,” John declares.  Boy, nothing gets past that guy.  Gee, good thing that gaggle of silly girls had these men to make the decisions for them.  Can you imagine where they’d be otherwise?

So they head upstairs, and Louise is clearly worse (despite the awesome care and attention she’s been receiving), and then they find Susan’s body.  Karen screams, while John struggles to convey an emotion, any emotion, on his impassive face.  Karen continues to scream and runs down the stairs.  “Catch her!” her dad yells.  “She’s hysterical!”  Yes, Karen, stop overreacting.  Gah!

She runs outside, straight into the arms of…Egon.  Regular Egon, though, not Monster Egon.  (The timing of this is technically impossible, by the way, since he apparently needs the equipment in his cave to change back and forth.  But eh, whatever.)  Egon indulges in the opportunity to hold Karen and comfort her.

Richardson fills Egon in, and notes that they’re leaving for the mainland straight away.  Egon demurs, pointing out that Richardson’s motorboat—which again, has apparently been sitting there the entire time—is now wrecked.  “When did that happen?!” Richardson barks in comical exasperation, sounding exactly like old Mr. Wilson being confronted with Dennis the Menace’s latest piece of mischief.

And, oh, neither air boat has much gas left.  “Gene forgot to bring the new supply,” we’re told.  Man, Richardson runs a real shipshape operation here.* Conveniently, though, Richardson has nearly fixed the radio.  Remember?  Back at the beginning of the movie, when we watched the Monster touch a screwdriver to some wires?  I can only assume this represented ‘wrecking the radio.’

[*Uhm, isn’t the uncle’s house right across the canal?  Doesn’t that have a radio?  Some gas to scavenge?  Maybe another boat?]

Ricardson and John go to the communications hut, where the former tells John to leave the outside door open.  Why?  You’ll see.  Meanwhile, Egon is inside the house still comforting Karen.  She’s so distraught that she doesn’t notice his clumsy semi-gropings, or the way that he’s draped all over her.  That you’d think she’d notice, but, you know, the distraught.

Egon leaves to check on John and Richardson.  He lurks outside the communication shack and observes their progress on the radio.  So there, that’s why Richardson had the door left open, so Egon could listen in on them.  But then, as Egon leaves, he silently closes the door as he goes.  Why?  You’ll see.

Egon returns to Karen.  He decides the time is right and spills the beans.  He explains that he killed all of Karen’s friends because “they were no good.”  And now the two of them could go live in his cave together forever and ever.  To his chagrin, though, Karen isn’t entirely on board with all this.  Women.  They say they want you to be spontaneous, but then they get all in your face when you are.  Also, when they tell you don’t need to get them a Valentine’s Day gift, because she agrees it’s a phony holiday, brother, you better get her a Valentine’s Day gift!

As such things happen, as soon as Karen learns all this she faints.  I’ve read several of the standard Victorian era medical texts, and apparently this is because females are particularly susceptible to what doctors call ‘brain fever.’  Anyway, this allows Egon to carry her off to his air boat and make his escape.

Indeed, he might have snuck away completely unnoticed, if not for one thing:  In the communications shack, Richardson suddenly shouts, “John, the door’s closed!”  This alerts them…to something, I guess.  Anyway, the door is indeed just closed.  It wasn’t jammed shut to trap them in there or anything.  Apparently Egon just closed it so that Richardson could eventually notice it was closed and be alerted that mischief was afoot.  Which I guess is also why Richardson wanted the door left open in the first place.  And so the great mysteries of The Door that Didn’t Bark in the Nighttime is solved.

”John!  Good lord, look!  THE DOOR IS CLOSED!!!”

Meanwhile, a closed door can only mean one thing.  “I’m going to check on Karen!” John yells.  They rush outside just in time to (I guess, you kind of have to put the pieces together here) see Egon leave.  And so they jump into their own air boat and…that’s right, we now get an air boat chase.  And yes, it’s fully as exhilarating as I’m sure you’re imagining it to be.

And so this progresses for over three straight minutes before Egon arrives above his underwater cave.  Lucky you; to you the chase lasted as long it took to read a single sentence; to me, a lifetime!  Anyoo, the guys have fallen a bit behind.  This allows Egon the time to shove Karen into the water and drag her down through the cave’s underwater entrance.

Man, I’m bored.  OK, here’s scoop.  Egon shows us how he transforms into the Jellyfish Monster, a process portrayed at some length, and I can’t figure out what’s going on.  He doesn’t don the overlarge jellyfish he has in his tank, he stands over it, and custard appears on his face, and I guess he basically excretes a new jellyfish on top of his head, and at the same time literally manifests his wetsuit and flippers, and his head is encased in a semi-transparent inflated garbage bag, and there you go, rah, he’s a monsta.

The kids went too far when they gave Egon an exploding custard donut.

So John dives down and finds the cave, and he has a flare, and he and Jellyfish Monster circle around each other warily for several hours, and occasionally the Monster grabs him but in perhaps the single most retarded example of the Hero’s Death Battle Exemption ever, the Monster conveniently suddenly doesn’t have any venom on his hands, so John’s OK, and they stumble around the little set for a good long time, and then John accidentally drops his flare into the jellyfish tank, and this mortally wounds both the Master Jellyfish and Egon himself, and smoke comes out of the Ten Dollar Super Science Control Panel, which heralds the traditional Inexplicable Climatic Explosion, which is realized by uncapping a scuba tank so that we see a burst of air bubbles in the water.

And that’s basically it.  Of course, there are a few fine points during this final twelve minutes.  The best is Egon’s inevitable Mad Scientist Rant.  Again, though, because of the sound you can barely hear parts of it:

“I told your father I could do it, but he wouldn’t believe me. They all said I was crazy!*  But I did it.  I stole the instruments from your father.  Then I fed the electricity down here from my house on the island.  Look at him.  Look at him, Karen!  Better than 20 inches across!  Living in captivity! All the bright marine biologists said they couldn’t be grown!  But I found the answer.  Sea water, electricity, and human blood [!!!!], mixed with a chemical I stole from your father’s lab.”

[*Close, Egon, but the proper formulation is, “They called me mad!  Mad, am I?  I’ll show them!  I’ll show them all!”]

In the end, Egon lays dying (in perhaps the film’s only effective effect, he has what are supposed to be bloody, exploded man/jellyfish remains around his head.  Karen is genuinely upset, which is kind of weird, because although she kept saying she liked Egon when he pestered her about it, this is the first time I got that she really was supposed to care for him.

Karen keeps yelling for John to get Egon out of the cave too.  However, Egon knows it’s too late, and frankly John doesn’t really look like he cares in any case.  (Have I mentioned that I really don’t like John very much?)  So he hauls Karen out of there.  Why can’t she swim up on her own—it’s not like John even has a scuba tank—and have John take Egon?  Because, I guess, she’s a girl.  So we get the bubble fountain, and that ends that.

Ta da.

The Words of the Master:

Sting of Death is available on one of those incredibly loaded DVDs Something Weird once flooded the market with.  For one low price you get not only Sting of Death, but Death Curse of Tartu.  Plus you get a bad nudie short, and what appears to be a hilarious ‘man trapped on an island of cannibal women” movie that they cut down to 30 minutes, meaning that it’s all the good stuff.  Then there’s a selection of trailers for several of Grefé’s movies.  That right there is a terrific package.

What really makes the disc invaluable, though, is that Grefé contributes commentary tracks for both movies.  Moreover, these are moderated (a format I always though worked best, since it keeps things focused, and reduces the likelihood of the dreaded “I forgot I’m supposed to be saying anything” five minute commentary pause) by none other than Frank Henenlotter, the director himself of such cult films as Basket Case and Frankenhooker.  (Oddly, Henenlotter sounds a lot like Alan Alda.)

They prove a great duo.  Luckily, Grefé has a great memory and is able to relate a lot of details about making the films.  Moreover, he has a sense of fun about the movies, which helps a lot.  I’m sure this was a great time of his life, being a guy in his early ‘30s, making movies more or less in his backyard and with a lot of pretty girls around all the time.  Not a bad life, really.  And hey, here he is talking about his pictures decades later, because people are still watching them.

Right off the bat, Grefé explains (or confirms, really) that was hard to keep the Monster’s garbage bag head inflated.  This explains why the Monster, except in key scenes, was generally shot from the knees down:  It meant they didn’t have to have the guy playing the monster wear the full rig.

Grefé gives fully of some great details.  He relates the travails of filming in the producer’s house (the guy insisted, to save money), and of course how they trashed the place.  And the blood blister on Richardson’s head was written in with the guy smacked his head after falling off one of the air boats.  It’s a real education in what it’s like to make a low-budget film.  Indeed, even with the changes in technology and such, I imagine a lot of people working on similar productions today would nod along to a lot of what he says.

They also get into some of Grefé’s marginally more famous work, like the Willard-with-snakes picture Stanley.  Grefé tells an amusing story about working with the great character actor Alex Rocco on the film (Rocco played Moe Green in The Godfather, who gets memorably shoot through the eye).  Rocco was to be attacked by snakes in a pool, but refused to swim around with real reptiles.

Grefé agreed to use rubber snakes in the scene and fix it in editing, but had some guys ready to throw real snakes at Rocco once he was in the water.  Rocco apparently exited the scene swearing quite heavily at the director.  Henenlotter replies that he heard Rocco himself relating this story during a Bob Costas interview, and that the actor still sounded pissed.

Sadly, there’s not much of a story behind the Neil Sedaka song.  He was in Florida hitting the club circuit, they offered him a couple of grand to sing a song for the movie, and he did.

As I said, it’s a perfect combo.  Henenlotter obviously prepared for this gig, and genuinely sounds like a fan of Grefé’s work.  He did some research and knows what questions he wants to ask, but isn’t so overprepared that he can’t enjoy the movie as it unspools.  Indeed, he points out several of the same things my review does.  Even so, there’s never an air of disrespect here.  Both men are toilers in the low budget fields, and Henenlotter can enjoy the film’s deficiencies without once ever sounding snide about them.  Like us, he thinks these add to the movie’s enjoyment value, and Grefé seems to appreciate this.

Grefé, for his part, again has a great memory for people, and generally has an anecdote for anybody Henenlotter mentions.  Moreover, he’s capable of enjoying the film for what it is, too, and takes Henenlotter’s utterly affectionate critiques in stride.  Both men know the compromises inherent in making films under these conditions, and Grefé just sounds tickled to know that people are still entertained by his films.  It’s a terrific commentary.

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by Ken Begg