Channelling More Schlock

I've found another of those streaming channels which continuously streams old movies.  This one actually features several channels, devoted to various types of entertainment.  Most relevant to me are the five movie channels, particularly the one devoted to horror and science fiction.  Over this past weekend alone, I've managed to catch three old films I've never seen before, indeed, one that I'd never heard of before.  Yeah, I know that it is hard to believe, but even for an obsessive watcher of schlock like myself, there are still low-rent movies out there to be discovered.  The other two were films I knew about, but had never seen all the way through.  The first of these was Man Without a Body (1957), an absolutely astounding British B-movie - a wealthy businessman dying of a brain tumor obtains the head of Nostradamus and has it revived by a scientist using a revolutionary process, with the aim of having the head's brain replace his own.  Now, you probably think that there's a flaw in this plan: surely this wouldn't save the millionaire's life, as it would be Nostradamus, now in his body, who would enjoy a new lease of life.  But that's because, like me, you apparently have a fundamental misunderstanding of how brains, let alone things like memory and personality work.  According to the movie's main scientist, after a while, the new brain will take on the characteristics of its host body.  Including, by implication, the personality and memories of its predecessor - quite how it can do this when these, according to conventional wisdom, reside in the brain itself, is never explained.  Bizarrely, it is also suggested that, despite the change in personality, the transplanted brain would retain Nostradamus' predictive powers, which the millionaire hopes to use in order to make a killing on the stock market.

Obviously, it all goes horribly wrong and Nostradamus' whole head ends up transplanted onto the body of a doctor murdered by the millionaire, (the medic had been knocking off his mistress), with the resulting monster going on a very low-budget rampage before its head falls off.  The whole thing has that air of delirium about it, that marks out the truly schlocky.  Production values are threadbare, dialogue alternates between inane and insane and it is full of surreal sights such as people having conversations with a severed head sat on a table.  This was followed by Edgar G Ulmer's The Man From Planet X (1951) which, despite its low budget, does boast a particularly decent and other worldly looking alien.  Just the one, mind - the budget wouldn't extend to showing us any of his millions of compatriots on the titular 'Planet X', (a rogue planet passing close enough to the earth for them to send him as an advance scout).  Interestingly, for its era, the film depicts the aliens as desperate rather than evil - if they don't colonise the earth, they will freeze to death as their world hurtles into deep space.  Indeed, the alien himself is as much victim as aggressor, as he finds himself being tortured for information about his advanced technology by William Schallert's unethical Dr Mears,  With its Hollywood Scotland setting - with huge wreaths of fog disguising, not entirely successfully, that the sets are actually recycled from Joan of Arc (1948) - it feels almost as surreal as Man Without a Body.

Which brings us to the film that I hadn't seen before: Planet of the Prehistoric Women (1966).  Not to be confused with Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), this is an independently made full colour B-movie directed by Arthur C Pierce.  Pierce was responsible for a number of low budget science fiction movies in the mid sixties, including The Human Duplicators (1965), Dimension 5 (1966) and The Destructors (1966).  They are all competently made, if entirely derivative, B-movies which are entertaining while they are on.  Planet of the Prehistoric Women is somewhat more ambitious than the others, presenting an interplanetary adventure, with a spaceship being sent to an uncharted planet to try and find survivors from another ship that crash-landed there.  Due to Einsteinian time dilation, by the time the search party arrives, they find themselves dealing with the offspring of the survivors.  There are the usual photographically enlarged lizards and savage cavemen running around the primitive planet, but the only women there, despite the title, seem to be those from the rescue ship.  The whole thing has a 'twist' ending that, if you've read enough science fiction, you'll see coming a mile off.  It is tempting to think that Star Trek, the earliest episodes of which were showing on US TV when this film was made, might have been an influence on the set up of the rescue ship's crew and the whole space fleet background.  The interior design of the space ship is actually pretty decent and a lot of miniatures work is surprisingly good in a low budget sort of way.  so there you have it - another source of schlocky low budget goodness for my entertainment - long may it stay upon Roku!