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Paul T. Monster
Reviews
The Jar (1984)
One of the strangest movies I've ever seen.
The plot involves a hairy guy named Paul who picks up a creepy old man who was injured in a car accident. The old man insists on taking along this jar wrapped in a bag. Paul takes the old man back to his (Paul's) apartment, the old man vanishes and Paul is left with this jar, which contains this little blue monster that looks like one of the Ghoulies. After that, things get weird as Paul hallucinates and/or dreams all this stuff.
I suppose there could be some symbolism in the film, but we know nothing about Paul before the dreams start, and the dreams seem to have no connection to anything that is happening. My theory is that the director or writer or whoever it was that decided to make this movie took all the weird dreams he had had in his life and rolled them into this painful film. None of the dreams are memorable enough to require a visual translation, though, so they're quite boring to watch. This begs the question of why he decided to do it.
This movie has the feel of a really bad student film. Someone attempting to make an "arty" movie.
Another interesting thing about this film is that it was made in Colorado, but appears to be badly dubbed. All the characters have these dull, out-of-place voices that don't seem to match their faces. It reminds me of B-Movies from the '60s like "Manos: The Hands of Fate" and "The Beast of Yucca Flats" that were either recorded without sound or had the sound erased, and then tried to put sound back in in post-production.
I think this is a bad movie, but I'm no expert. There could be some deep meaning to this film that I don't get. Give it a rent and see for yourself.
Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro (1968)
Laughably bad Japanese Sci-Fi/Horror.
I saw this movie dubbed into English under Pacemaker's title "Body Snatcher from Hell" and it's an interesting movie. Also a very terrible movie, but interesting none the less.
The plot: A terrorist/assassin is hijacking a plane, but before that can happen, the pilot is blinded by a flying saucer and he crashes. The survivors are then terrorized by an animated chunk of silver yogurt who arrives in a spaceship. This gooey, globular monster enters the brain through a gash in the victim's forehead, and for some reason that wasn't explained this makes the victim suck blood. Also present in this movie are special effects such as dummies and foam rocks thrown from cliffs. And in the end of this movie we learn that the aliens have decided to teach the humans not to kill each other in wars or fires or traffic accidents by killing all the humans.
This film is laughably bad, but if you're not used to really bad movies it might prove boring. On a so-bad-it's-funny scale I'd rate it a two out of four.
The Food of the Gods (1976)
Big rats eat bad actors! Scared yet?
Bert I. Gordon, who made many films in the 50s about big mutated things (as well as directed more movies that would later appear on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 than any director), returns in the 70s with this giant killer rat movie (there are also giant wasps, caterpillars, and chickens, but the rats get the most screen time).
This film is a stupid mess. The editing is bizarre to say the least. They did a decent job making some of the rat puppets that are used in the attack scenes, but you can tell they're really phony by the way they move. Most of the film uses shots of live rats, though, and unconvincingly puts dozens of them next to cheap models. Worse yet, when the hero of the film shoots the rodents, they use images of real live rats sitting on the model building actually being shot to illustrate this. This is cruel, very unpleasant to watch (for me anyway), and ruins what otherwise would have been a bad, but entertaining B-flick. I would have been less disturbed if they'd shot the human actors in this film, instead. At least then it would have been characters I didn't care about.
Octaman (1971)
One of the most boring movies I've ever seen.
Yawn! There's almost nothing to say about his film except that it's really bad. Imagine if the makers of "Manos" The Hands of Fate remade Creature of the Black Lagoon and you have this movie in a nutshell, only this movie might be even more boring.
Most of the time they film this thing through a filter during the day for night scenes....resulting in many scenes where you can't tell what's going on, and couldn't care less. The monster, Octaman, is very stupid looking, and you can see the strings on his tentacles. There are also lots of scenes of people sitting around...and walking...and driving...and absolutely nothing happening except moments of your life that you can never get back ticking away.