Monster of the Day #202

Updated on February 21, 2011 By Ken Begg 17 Comments

Saw this yesterday so it seemed appropriate.

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  • No! Don’t shoot, he’s trying to surrender!

  • The Rev.

    I wanna know what joker made roller skates big enough for Gargons. And that fit on their tails. That person should be subjected to TORCHA!!!

  • fish eye no miko

    We’re gonna need a lot of drawn butter…

  • Rock Baker

    And yet, despite this damning evidence, Teenagers From Outer Space really isn’t a bad little movie. You know what always impressed me the most? The little dog being zapped and the skeleton falling to the ground. The editing on that was perfect.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Yeah, TFOS isn’t bad at all. A little stiff in the acting department, but there’s a definite imagination at work.

  • If nothing else, it’s quite a fun little picture. Certainly not a snoozefest like, oh, Teenage Monster.

  • The Rev.

    I was surprised when this turned out to be better than I ever would have suspected.

    The Gargons are still a scream, though.

  • Well, let me be clear. TfOS isn’t ‘good’ in any objective sense; indeed, it’s pretty laughable. It’s entertaining, though, and so good from that standpoint. However, the hilariously stilted acting–the guy who plays Thor is a riot–the general, er, production limitations, even the fake beards…oh, the fake beards. There are a couple of doozies in the film–the Space Leader’s, for example–as was highlighted when it was projected on a large screen. And that was when the source material was a crappy, probably gray market copy. (It certainly wasn’t the Image DVD.)

    That said, the skeleton ray is one of those things that’s moronic and awesome at the same time. And I liked how the hero acted like earthlings had no chance against Thor because of our primitive firearms. Until, that is, Thor gets a couple of bullets put into him. As you’d expect him to.

  • Rock Baker

    I don’t know. At what point does one ask too much of a drive-in picture? It’s certainly no Revenge of the Creature or The Monolith Monsters, but for what is basically a home movie with more ambition than anything else, Teenagers has enough raw charm to smooth over some of the rough spots. Or so would be my take. The storytelling aspect is certainly better than 80% of movies being released now.

    After pulling a major boner last week, I dug out my copy of Sssssss this weekend and rewatched it. Although it works in its own way, I have to say the 400′ digest version is actually better! Having that joke go over my head may be my greatest shame!

  • fish eye no miko

    @Ken: Yeah, Thor getting shot was actually pretty cool. I get so sick of monsters/aliens/whatever that are immune to bullets, especially when there’s no darn reason for them to be! The embiggened person/animal genre is especially bad in this regard. At least with aliens there’s the excuse that they might have thicker/harder skin/or an invisible focefield or something. But with Earth animals that are just bigger than normal, even assuming thicker skin/fur/feathers/whatever, it can’t be so much thicker than it’s completely immune to bullets, for Pete’s sake!

  • D. Jason Fleming

    To be fair to the makers of Teenagers, they did something else that was very impressive (to me, at least). It was filmed entirely in Los Angeles (and surrounding areas), and yet they managed to make it feel like it takes place in a much smaller city. Some of it is framing, some of it is simply finding parts of LA not often used on film. But it’s pretty dang impressive to make a low-budget flick in LA that does not feel at all like it takes place in LA.

  • Petoht

    But what about the TORCHA?!

  • The Rev.

    When I said it was better than I ever would have suspected, I meant that it was a good time and I’d watch it again. I assumed it’d just suck, not suck in a fun way. It’s not, as Ken said, a good movie, but it’s a good time for bad movie fans.

    To be fair, I may have assumed it would suck due to the other movies in that particular boxed set, which to that point had been very hard to watch (Blood Tide, She-Gods of Shark Reef, Prehistoric Women, and The Amazing Petrified World). This and Robot Monster broke the string for that set. Wild Women of Wongo kind of straddled the line.

  • TongoRad

    I did so much head shaking and forehead slapping during Wild Women of Wongo that I needed a chiropractor afterwards. Sometimes you just have to wonder how those movies got made…

    A sleeper in that set may be The Brain Machine, though it would probably help to view it with a crowd. My 13 year-old son and I watched it together and had an absolute ball, breaking out into spontaneous commentary directed at the screen throughout. To this day he still refers to it as the “lawn furniture of doom” movie.

  • P Stroud

    @Jason. I lived in LA in the 50s and there were still plenty of separate smaller municipalites a few miles from the city proper. It wouldn’t have been hard to get the small town atmosphere back then.

  • The Rev.

    TR: RE: WWoW, I wanted to strangle that parrot, but otherwise it was kind of a benign, fun bad for us. We had a decent time watching it. It was more enjoyable than Prehistoric Women, “dragon” notwithstanding.

    RE: TBM, that title doesn’t ring a bell; not sure if it’s in there or not. I’ll have to look tonight when I get home; if it is, I’ll try and make a point to watch it soon.

    Man, I’ve had that thing for years and have barely scratched the surface. I must have at least 40 movies to go, if not more. I need more time, dammit!

  • TongoRad

    Hopefully you’ll catch the same wave that we did, Rev.

    I think I’ll make a point to show my son Teenagers From Outer Space this week, come to think of it. I’m sure he’ll be game for it, and if not I’ll just show him that photo above.