Mid-week Movie Break: Summer Drive-In Spectacular!

It’s hot! It’s wet! No, it’s not a Blowfly song, it’s summer (more or less)! What do we do in the summer? We pile in the car and head down to the drive-in! Or we used to. I am one of the fortunate ones who is still able to partake in this particularly American pastime, as the Vali-Hi is literally just eight miles up the interstate from me! True, the only films available to see at the drive-in these days are first run features like three hour Marvel Comics pictures or computer animated children’s features, but sometimes it’s worth sitting through a Shrek or an Iron Man 3 just for the experience. 

Not to step on the toes of the mighty Joe Bob Briggs, I thought, in celebration of the summer, I’d do an ode to the drive-in days of yore, much appreciated by Ichibunnies and nostalgia aficionados alike; back when there would be dusk-til-dawn show-o-ramas featuring quickie horror and sci-fi pictures. I’ve chosen a double feature of films that are easily accessible to watch from the comfort of your own home; free of the mosquitos, devoid of the hazard of the idiot in his monster-sized diesel guzzler pulling in to the front row spot ahead of you and blocking the screen, and no need to find D-cells for that old radio to tune in the audio.

Don’t worry, I’ll control myself and keep it brief.

Our first feature takes us out onto the Caribbean Sea and to the sunny beaches of South America. Watch out, there’s a commotion in the ocean, and it ain’t no giant clam! It’s Roger Corman’s 1961 heist/secret agent/comedy/monster picture Creature From The Haunted Sea!  Describing the film won’t do it any favors, and showing a picture of the monster, if you aren’t familiar already, likely won’t entice you to watch it, but subjectively speaking I find it an enjoyable watch.

Renzo and Mary-Belle smooch, unaware of the
creature waiting to strike.

To boil it down, the political coup in Cuba that put Castro into power has run the old guard out. A general, Tostada, and a team of soldiers, make a deal with shady nightclub owner and gangster Renzo Capetto to smuggle the troops and a chunk of the Cuban treasury off of the island. Renzo and his gang of oddball miscreants devise a plan to kill off the Cubans when the boat hits the water, using the guise of a phony sea monster, planning to keep the gold for themselves. Turns out, much to everyone’s chagrin, that there is in fact a real sea monster (of sorts) who has been tailing them, and he’s hungry. Thrown into the mix, our narrator and guide through this oddball madness, is a secret agent, real name XK150. He loses sight of his mission to track Renzo’s path across the water and coordinate his capture by authorities when he falls for Renzo’s gun moll Mary-Belle Monahan.

Despite being what could be Roger Corman’s most slap-dash production, Creature From The Haunted Sea has a heavy vein of Naked Gun-esque humor to it. I don’t know if David Zucker was a Corman aficionado or not, but there are certainly parallels to the sight gags and droll humor here. Of interest to note is that Agent XK150 is played by none other than Robert Towne, screenwriter and filmmaker who wrote the screenplays for Chinatown and Shampoo.

You can watch the trailer here and the film here.

But wait, there’s more! For our second feature, let’s vacation to the sweltering small town of Furnace Flats. Crazy recluse Pete Jenson slashes a goat and then himself one night, then smears the blood around a hexagon on the floor of his ramshackle cabin. He’s made a deal with the devil! 

Shortly after, a young man named Nick Richards appears in town. He claims to be Pete’s nephew, settling in town to go through Pete’s, erm, estate. Anyhow he makes himself real friendly to the five or six folks who seem to inhabit the desert town, but they start to get real suspicious of this so-called Nick when they notice he doesn’t seem to sweat a single drop, regardless of how hot the weather gets. Well, things go awry and a series of animal attacks leave the citizens of town rattled and/or dead. Turns out Nick isn’t who he says he is…. The film is a solid little thriller that seems like it could have been an episode of the Boris Karloff series Thriller. Despite some massive plot holes, it’s a great watch that would fit right in on Svengoolie. And if you haven't seen the film, be it known up front that there is no footage of a nude woman astride a centaur anywhere in it.

The film was made in 1958, but was released in 1961 when sold to Roger Corman’s Filmgroup Releasing company. It was put on a double bill with, you guessed it, Creature From The Haunted Sea. Devil’s Partner was directed by Charles R. Rondeau who directed numerous episodes of some of the greatest television shows in tv history, including Batman, Mission: Impossible, The Wild Wild West, Surfside 6 and more. The amazing soundtrack here is composed by frequent Corman collaborator Ronald Stein, and the great news is the tunes are now available to purchase and download through various digital music channels. Take a listen here.

You can watch the trailer here or the film here. Or, if so inclined, can purchase a dvd with all kinds of drive-in ephemera on it from Sinister Cinema here. This isn’t a sponsored nod, I’m simply directing you towards a product that I have personally enjoyed, from a great small business that I have solicited.

I left out a wealth of backstory and personnel bio info to keep things relatively compact here. The main thing is to enjoy the films. If you want to set up an in-home double feature for yourself, with all of the drive-in trappings, here are some intermission reels to add to the fun. Stay safe and don't forget the popcorn!

Mid-Week Movie Break: The Monster Of Piedras Blancas

This week we utilize our Mid-Week Movie Break to hit the beach! Not the sunny, surfer-filled beaches of Hawaii, Southern California, or Lake City, MN,  but the craggy, brackish lighthouse property on the coastal outskirts of Piedras Blancas, CA. Get your baggies on and remember — six feet apart!

A page from issue 18 of The Monster Times,
spotlighting TMOPB.

The Monster Of Piedras Blancas is a sleepy little creature feature produced by Vanwick Productions, and is largely the culmination of favors called in by producer Jack Kevan, a makeup specialist and effects engineer who worked under the infamous Bud Westmore at Universal. You can watch the trailer here, or the entire picture here. It features a bevy of familiar faces from the world of 1950s television and b-film celluloid, like Les Tremayne (The Angry Red Planet, The Monolith Monsters) and Forrest Lewis (The Thing That Couldn’t Die), and features some shocking-for-its-time gore, especially when compared to what companies like AIP and Universal-International were putting out concurrently. The story hinges on a persnickety lighthouse keeper named Sturges forming a relationship with a legendary sea monster after his wife passes away. Lonely and isolated, Sturges (John Harmon, veteran radio, television and film actor who has appeared in key episodes of Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, The Rifleman and others) discovers that the rumored monster is real and starts to leave meat scraps for it. The monster grows dependent on Sturges’s offerings, so much so that years later when Sturges arrives at the local grocer’s store a day late and doesn’t get the scraps, the monster goes on a  killing spree. In the mix to add to the drama is Sturges’s daughter Lucille, back from college for the summer, and her new beau, a young scientist simply named Fred.

The opening shot to the Flipper episode "Flipper's Monster".

Our young protagonists Fred and Lucille, simply credited as “The Boy” and “The Girl”, are played by Jeanne Carmen and Don Sullivan. Carmen was a pinup queen and actress who starred with Jayne Mansfield in The Untamed Youth and was a familiar face within the pages of men’s magazines of the time. She was also an uncredited stripper in the Betty Page burlesque film Striporama and was the first female trick-shot golfer. You can hear her tell it all here. Yes, it would be criminal to neglect the fact that she was also in a Three Stooges short, “A Merry Mix-Up”, even if it was during the waning Joe Besser years. Sullivan is probably better known for his starring role in the teens vs. monster cult classic The Giant Gila Monster, which came out the same year. We get to hear Don rock out in Gila Monster with his ukulele, crooning “The Mushroom Song,” which you can see/hear here.  Carmen allegedly had some ties to the Kennedys and the mob and was advised to make herself scarce after Marilyn Monroe turned up dead, eventually moving to Arizona where she lived in obscurity for decades. Sullivan left the entertainment business to become a chemist and entrepreneur for the cosmetic hair care industry. 

Jeanne Carmen in a publicity still from The Three Stooges short A Merry Mix-Up.
Carmen is third from the left, cuddling up to Joe Besser.

The picture was produced by Jack Kevan and production partner Irvin Berwick, a one-time dialog editor for Columbia who had worked with William Castle and Jack Arnold, so he was already entrenched in the ways of the low budget sci-fi/horror/monster movie. Tired of working in obscurity in largely thankless and uncredited roles for the studios, Kevan and Berwick decided to try their hand at becoming independent producers, hence Vanwick Productions. The picture was made for around $29,000 with a number of favors and at-cost help being utilized from Kevan’s old connections at Universal. To my knowledge the only other picture Vanwick Productions ever had a hand in producing is a seedy 1966 drama called The Street Is My Beat, filmed in Texas. Kevan and Berwick did work together again however on pictures like Crown International’s The 7th Commandment (1961).

Don Sullivan on his book The Perfect Look:
Don Sullivan's Hair Care Secrets

Jack Kevan had helped develop the Gill-man suit for the Creature From The Black Lagoon and the applications for the titular creatures in The Mole People; elements of both were used in the Piedras Blancas monster costume, as well as pieces from the Metaluna Mutant from This Island Earth. The Piedras Blancas suit surfaced again years later in the 1965 Flipper tv series episode “Flipper’s Monster”, where Flipper comes across a low-budget monster movie production. The episode was directed by none other than Ricou Browning, the man who wore the Gill-man suit for the underwater shots in Creature From The Black Lagoon and can be seen here. The Monster Of Piedras Blancas was directed by Berwick, whose son Wayne makes an appearance as the little boy who finds the headless grocer. The film is ably acted for the most part. If anything it’s really the pacing that keeps it from being something special, which by no means should imply that it’s unwatchable. It’s a by-the-numbers late 1950s low budget monster movie which tries to make up for its short changing you on action with a mild dose of gore vis-a-vis some decapitated heads. Berwick went on to direct low budget pictures like Strange Compulsion, Malibu High and Hitch Hike To Hell through the early 1980s. Kevan, who helped with makeup effects on everything from The Wizard of Oz to Abbott And Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde to The Incredible Shrinking Man, seems to have abandoned the Hollywood game for the most part after The Monster Of Piedras Blancas and by the mid-sixties had joined Don Sullivan in the cosmetics field, as indicated by this 1965 article (below) from the Honolulu Star Bulletin.

Honolulu Star Bulletin article highlighting the career of Jack Kevan.

Though the film was largely forgotten after it’s release, it’s a fun little foam rubber monster romp that has endured mostly as an iconic still image of the titular monster brandishing one of the aforementioned severed heads, featured regularly in monster magazines of the 1960s and 70s, forcing itself onto the must-see lists of a whole generation of monster kids who were probably unlikely to find it before the advent of home video, save in a truncated 8mm print released to the consumer market. Punk aficionados will recognize the famous still of the monster and rubber head from the cover of the Angry Samoans’s 1982 debut LP “Back From Samoa”. 

Packaging of the Super 8 home movie version of
The Monster of Piedras Blancas.

While The Monster Of Piedras Blancas isn’t as strong a fish-man monster film as even the weakest of the Universal Creature From The Black Lagoon trilogy, nor nearly as revered a cult classic as Del Tenney’s The Horror Of Party Beach, I still recommend a viewing.