A Job for Superman, Chapter 5, in the 15-part black & white series that introduced Superman to the screen in 1948. Visit again next Saturday for Chapter 6, Superman in Danger!
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Man of Steel, Chapter 4, in the 15-part black & white series that introduced Superman to the screen in 1948. Visit again next Saturday for Chapter 5, A Job for Superman.
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We continue with Columbia Pictures’ original 15-part series from 1948 introducing Superman, the Man of Steel. On tap today, Chapter 3, The Reducer Ray. Please look under the category, Saturday Matinees, to view the first two chapters.
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Saturday Matinee continues with Depths of the Earth, Chapter 2, in Columbia Pictures’ 15-part series that introduced Superman, the Man of Steel, to the Silver Screen. Scroll back to 7-14-12 on the Call Me Stormy blog to catch Chapter 1, Superman Comes to Earth. Join us again next Saturday for another episode in this classic, cliff-hanging series.
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The Carrie Fisher-William Shatner feud reignited over the weekend when the two stars both appeared at Comic-Con in San Diego. They didn’t bump up against each other in the flesh, but Fisher told the world via Twitter, “I’m horrified to hear that intergalactic fraud Bill Shatner will also be at Comic Con,” while Shatner tweeted an unflattering photo of a “Fisher sighting” at Comic-Con, purporting to show a more rotund Fisher in her original Princess Leia bikini. Shatner touched off the rift last September when he dismissed Star Wars as being a Star Trek clone. The comment prompted dueling YouTube videos by Fisher and Shatner, presented here to bring you up to speed on the contretemps.
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Today, we launch a new Saturday Matinee series on Call Me Stormy. Once a week, every Saturday, we’ll present a short and sweet chapter from one of the classic matinee serials — B-Westerns, jungle adventures, Spy vs. Spy, crime mellers, outer space operas or something else worth your while — to help kick off the weekend in style. Where possible, we’ll run these original serials in full, presenting a new chapter each week until they’ve reached their cliff-hanging conclusion.
First up, Superman Comes to Earth, the original screen appearance by the Man of Steel. Columbia Pictures created this chapter as part of a 15-episode, black-and-white serial that played theatrically in 1948, usually on Saturdays. Kirk Alyn appears as Clark Kent/Superman and Noel Neill as Lois Lane. One of the co-directors, Thomas Carr, later helmed many of the Superman TV shows.
Gorgo, this week’s Trillion Dollar Movie, might be mistaken for a British riff on Godzilla, except for one important fact: Godzilla was fashioned after The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, made in 1953 by none other than Eugene Lourie, the creator of Gorgo. Thus, Lourie wasn’t guilty of plagiarism when he shot the widescreen Gorgo in 1961, using a radiant Technicolor. Instead, he was re-appropriating his own original concept, after it had been recycled and rejuvenated in Japan.
The premise: A volcanic eruption off the coast of Ireland awakens a prehistoric monster who wreaks havoc on a fishing village. Disaster gets temporarily averted, however, when a couple of greedy adventurers capture the creature and haul it off to a circus in London. They’re warned by a young boy, Sean, to let the monster go. “It’s a bad thing you’re doing,” the urchin cautions,”…a terrible bad thing.”
Sean speaks the truth. Soon after the bellowing Gorgo is put on public display, resigned to disgrace and captivity much like Kong Kong, who should surface but the critter’s mother, 10 times taller and 10 times more ferocious. Navy carriers, submarines, fighter jets, tanks and flamethrowers can’t stop Lady G’s quest to rescue her boy. In no time, the Tower Bridge, Big Ben, Soho and Piccadilly Circus have all been trashed and smashed. Never mind that this she-beast is really a man in a latex suit, tearing apart miniature sets. Except for her wrinkly ab muscles, she’s one mighty lean, mean and green fighting mutha.
Sadly, this is the MST3k presentation of Gorgo, because the original version, sans snark commentary, has been removed from YouTube. It’s still quite worth a look. Hope you enjoy, and do join us again next Friday for another Trillion ($) Movie.
Somewhere on the spectrum between Frankenstein and Re-Animator, you’ll find today’s Trillion Dollar Movie: The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. But it’s a sleazier, low-budget example of this horror genre, shot on the cuff in 1959 and finally released in 1962 after writer-director Joseph Green secured a distribution deal.
Jason Evers, billed here as Herb Evers and later seen in Escape from Planet of the Apes, plays a mad scientist, Dr. Bill Cortner, who engages in closeted transplant experiments, involving grafted human body parts, in a secret laboratory. Good thing, too, because his girlfriend Jan (Virginia Leith) will be dismembered in a hideous car accident. Dr. Bill rescues her decapitated head, using a magical serum to keep her alive. Now, he has 48 hours to locate a body so she can be fully re-animated.
To the accompaniment of a wailing saxophone, his search takes him to the Moulin Rouge strip club, the Miss Body Beautiful contest and, ultimately, to the artist studio where a disfigured, man-hating model poses for a gaggle of leering cameramen. The women he’s stalking are quite cheeky, one saying, “Who’s to tell me to blow if I don’t want to?” Meanwhile, Jan is back at the lab, plotting her revenge with a cone-headed monster, resembling Sloth from The Goonies, mistakenly created by one of Dr. Bill’s earlier experiments that went awry. The dialogue is priceless as Jan tells the creature: “I’m only a head, and you’re whatever you are, but together, we’re strong.”
It might be low-budget, but given the never-ending march of inflation, who can argue with it being a Trillion ($) Movie? Return again next Friday for the next installment in our popular series, rescuing full-length and uncut vintage titles from the vaults of the Internet.
Peter Serafinowicz from the BBC 6Music Radio Show shares a New Age relaxation tape released by the Daleks, keeping busy while awaiting their return to Dr. Who. H/T Magnificent Octopus
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One of the greatest genres of all cinema, the “Lost World” movie, took a hit in the 1970s. Ray Harryhausen, the creature effects genius behind The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and One Million Years B.C., made his last prehistoric-monster movie in 1969 — The Valley of Gwangi. And the wonders of CGI hadn’t yet revitalized the genre. The 1970s, thus, became the lost decade for “Lost Worlds” on the silver screen, with one notable 
exception.
That exception: A series of four films by the team of director Kevin Connor, producer John Dark and star Doug McClure based on the Caprona novels by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. The first, and arguably the best of the series, was The Land That Time Forgot (1975), today’s Trillion ($) Movie. Here, an American adventurer played by McClure, along with a German U-Boat crew and some British stowaways, rediscover the long-lost island of Caprona in the south seas near Antarctica. Despite its location, Caprona is a balmy tropical paradise, kept warm by hot springs, burning tar pits and belching volcanoes. Miraculously, ferocious dinosaurs still roam the 
grounds as well as bands of troglodytes.
It takes a half-hour before our heroes reach Caprona, and the creatures there might look a bit cheesy, but the action remains good, clean fun, bolstered by a solid script from British sci-fi author Michael Moorcock. Enjoy, and stop back next Friday for another Trillion ($) Movie.
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