Written by: John T. Neville
Directed by: Sam Newfield
Starring: George Zucco,
Ralph Lewis, Hope Kramer
When I picked this flick, I
don't think I did more than look at the cover art before making the
decision. I'd heard of the movie before, but couldn't remember much
of anything I'd read, and based on the poster was expecting something
along the lines of The Giant Claw.
But any devoted fan of 50's giant monster flicks has heard of most
all of them. As popular as they were, in a time before
direct-to-video markets, a genre just couldn't get flooded like it
does today and it was a lot easier to keep track of even the lowliest
embiggened beasties.
Imagine
my surprise when I started looking up production information and
discovered the flick predated The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
by seven years. And the monster is only about the size of a large
dog.
Dr.
Andrew Forbes is searching for the lost treasure of the Aztecs, and
along with the gold, he discovers the creature they called
Quetzalcoatl. It's a sort of mangy horned lizard with the sorriest,
most threadbare wings you've ever seen. He somehow manages to
confine it to a cage in the treasure chamber, but makes the mistake
of giving his wife one of its “beautiful” (stop laughing,
they're beautiful, dammit!) feathers. The thing gets out and mauls
his wife to death, leading him to discover that the creature is
murderously jealous of its plumage. That's right, folks, we have
here what is to my knowledge the only vanity-driven monster in cinema
history.
When a
two-fisted radio announcer (!?) decides he's going to solve the
mystery of the vampire murders (the creature inexplicably drains its
victims of blood – well, it's not that inexplicable considering PRC
just cut-and-pasted some Aztec flim-flammery over the script to Devil
Bat, one of their most successful cheapie horror flicks, and
apparently didn't bother to remove the vampirism), he's going to have
a helluva time convincing the authorities that they're really up
against a mad archaeologist and his pet monster.
The
acting, as with most of these old programmers, is mostly solid
without being exceptional. The monster is an impressively ambitious
idea for a movie this cheap, and turns out so endearingly awful it's
hard not to like it. The one aspect that really stuck out for me is
that the Odious Comic Relief ™ character proves to be of some use
and even helps the hero fight off the monster at one point. A useful
comedic character in a horror flick is a rarity even today, and
almost unheard of when the Poverty Row studios ruled the genre.
I've
been having some difficulty finding anything to say about this flick.
The toughest part about doing these reviews (“Quit your damn
bitching, no one's making you do this and no one really wants you to
keep doing it!”, I hear you say) is finding a good angle to tackle
each article from; to find an interesting bit of information or a
good anecdote to wrap the whole thing around. Not every movie is
particularly inspiring in that regard. I enjoy watching lots of
movies that I don't have much to say about. But dammit, I've been
putting in a ton of extra hours during planting season and just
haven't had much time to pick anything else, and I've had this file
sitting half finished on my computer for weeks. So if nothing else,
I guess this will serve the purpose of cataloging the fact that I
watched yet another movie with nothing going for it but a monster so
mangy it makes the giant buzzard from Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster
look as majestic as a bald eagle.
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