Monster of the Day #85

Man, I haven’t seen this one in a dog’s age, enough so that I have but the fuzziest memories of it.  And I probably own it on DVD.  I’ll have to dig it out.

  • That’s a nice looking monster. Don’t make ’em like that any more.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Best part of the movie, really.

  • The Rev.

    I have never seen the movie but I’d know that mug anywhere! Rat-Bat-Spider attack!

  • Ericb

    When I was a kid the giant space amoeba with the rotating eye scared me more.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Ericb – yeah, me too, but this guy had a weirdness factor that went through the roof.

    Rev – what’s happened to your “D.D.” lately?

  • The Rev.

    Just about everyone calls me “Rev.” here so I just went with it. *shrugs*

  • Rock Baker

    In Cinemagic!

    I liked the three-eyed Martian, but they sure didn’t give him very much screen time. I think I heard that was Billy Curtis playing the Martian.

    Is it Journey to the Center of Time that features a quick glimpse of the Bat-rat-spider-crab? I think it is.

  • Rock Baker

    Best line: “My name is Iris, not Irish. Half the time I’m not sure if you’re calling me by name or nationality!”

  • Petoht

    Hey, cool. Netflix has The Angry Red Planet. Guess who’s adding it to his queue?

  • BeckoningChasm

    I decided to give this one a spin tonight. The print MGM used seems absolutely beautiful, crisp and colorful. (Of course, they haven’t gotten to Mars yet. Cinemagic ought to make normal comparison difficult.)

  • P Stroud

    Fun movie that I snuck into the second showing for when I saw it when I was 11.

    Gerald Mohr is a real low rent swinger though. Maybe he shoulda been named “Larry the Lounge Captain”.

  • BeckoningChasm

    The interesting thing about the above still is that it’s a much, much clearer view of the beastie that you get in the actual film. The Cinemagic process tends to make a lot of the shadows into extremely bright, foggy areas. This can be cool when they’re emerging from the spaceship for the first time, but it does make details difficult to discern.

    Funnily enough, MGM included the trailer for this, which showed this and the amoeba in black-and-white, “before applying Cinemagic” and I wonder if they didn’t make a plain black-and-white version for television.

  • Rock Baker

    I may have to get the MGM DVD for this. Right now I have a laserdisc double bill with Journey to the Seventh Planet and a copy taped off HBO many years ago. Oddly, the copy I taped from TV has much more vivid color. Strange as it sounds, the laserdisc doesn’t look all that nice (‘Seventh Planet’ even has some replaced music, the MGM DVD of that one was also superior).