Wall of Shame

            When you live in a Manhattan apartment you just have so much room for everything. Young people move today with very little, which I admit is a wiser way to travel- especially if moving often is your option. But I’ve been in the same apartment for over 40 years and I need my framed posters on the walls and pictures of lost loved ones. There is a room where I keep a gallery of 8 X 10 movie stills that I keep switching out. And they usually are ones from sci-fi and horror movies that make me laugh. Considering the room is the bathroom that only seems appropriate. Here are ten (in rotation) that just the sight of cheers me up endlessly.

            The Alligator People. A 1959 film about a young bride (Beverly Garland) traveling to a remote Louisiana mansion in an attempt to find her missing husband. There she finds out that crackpot scientific experiments have turned him into an alligator man. “I Married a Gator,” should have been the ad tag. Lon Chaney Jr. plays the “hate-filled, hook-handed Cajun.” But the movie still reminds me how much I love this CinemaScope howler.

            Trog. The final feature film of screen legend Joan Crawford is a 1970 British sci-fi film directed by talented cinematographer Freddie Francis. She plays an anthropologist who gets the opportunity to study a live male troglodyte found in a countryside cave. Crawford (God bless her) plays her part so earnestly, especially explaining colors to the missing link. “Green, Trog, green…” So sublimely stupid it just slays me.

            It Conquered the World. One of director Roger Corman’s enjoyable early horror quickies, about a menace from outer space, holed up in a nearby cave that sends out little bat-like creatures which attach to the necks of military and police taking over their bodies to assist in conquering the earth. The memorable creature looks like a toothy, halved cucumber with horns and claw-like arms. I love this still with actor Lee Van Cleef being attacked by the monster through a window (which sadly doesn’t happen in the film).

            From Hell it Came. Tabonga rules!!! A South sea island prince is wrongly accused of murdering his father. He vows revenge as he is stabbed to death with a dagger and buried. From the ground erupts a revenge-seeking tree trunk nick-named “Tabonga” by the natives. This killer tree stump slowly lumbers onto his victims, dragging them into the quicksand in scene after scene that unhinges the jaw. Gloriously ludicrous, the 8 X 10 still fills me with joy every time I see it.

            The Monster That Challenged the World. To be honest, this 1957 black & white sci-fi movie is pretty decent. An underwater earthquake in the California Salton Sea causes a giant mollusc to rise up and kill. The caterpillar-like creature is kind of cool (and there is one great jump-scare that still works on me). But the still of a woman in a bathing suit draped over the monster is pretty funny and wonderful. 

            Blood of Dracula. This is one of the AIP teenage monster pictures that ruled drive-ins in the late 1950s. Sandra Harrison plays the troubled teen who is dumped at a girls’ boarding school by her neglectful parents. Bullied by some of the girls she turns to the supposedly kind chemistry teacher Miss Branding (Louise Louis). Miss Branding hypnotizes her with an ugly amulet and uses her as a guinea pig in her twisted experiments, transforming the girl into a fanged, hideous monster. I just love this still of her scary transformation. It always screams, “here’s looking at you, kid.”

            Invasion of the Saucer Men. This 1957 sci-fi film is one of those beloved horror comedies American International Pictures turned out about a flying saucer landing that teenagers cannot get the police to take seriously. But the little, giant-headed creatures from the ship are just fabulous. The alien costumes were created by special effects monster maker Paul Blaisdell. I loved the dismembered alien hand that crept up on two teenaged lovebirds in their car.

            The Leech Woman. A 1960 Universal Studios horror favorite starring Colleen Gray as an aging, alcoholic wife who travels with her scientist husband to Africa and discovers a secret tribe potion that (mixed with the secretion of the pineal gland from an unwilling victim) restores youth to her. But she has to kill and kill again to retain her beauty. Better than Botox, that’s for sure. And what’s a few less men in the world? This picture of a wizened Colleen Gray is a laughable reminder of what I see in my own mirror every day.  

            I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. The teenage monster movies of the 1950s tapped into the hormonal misery kids were going through. It also offered roles to hunky male actors like Gary Conway who plays the result of an experiment by college lecturer Professor Frankenstein (Whit Bissell), assembling body parts to create a being from cadaver parts. Before appropriating Conway’s handsome face the creature has a frightening mutant, bug-eyed countenance, and gets loose occasionally terrifying everyone he runs into. I love this still with the monster and doc in a car. There is something so goofy and great about it.

            House on Haunted Hill. A terrifically entertaining 1959 horror film directed by William Castle starring Vincent Price as a kooky millionaire who offers money to a group of people if they can survive a night in a truly haunted house. The exterior shots are of the famous Frank Lloyd Wright house in Los Feliz, California. Now, I saw this in a packed theater of unruly kids and the movie photo I exhibit on the wall is when actress Carolyn Craig (as Nora) is investigating in the basement and is scarily confronted with the blind housekeeper who seemingly levitates by. She is played by Leona Anderson (who cut an unforgettably loony LP called Music to Suffer By). But that scene had every teen in the theater leap up in their seats and scream their damn fool heads off. That still immediately transports me back in time to that moment when I experienced this immense surge of emotions and sense of community, not to mention a burst of joyful, wild, unrestrained abandon. I guess I have spent the rest of my life trying to replicate that experience in thousands of seedy cinemas all over the world.