Sci-Fi Classics 4 [DVD] [1960] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

This collection of four 50s/60s schlock films might be worth buying if you like watching movies that verge on being awful. If you have ever wandered how bad movies can be, here is a good selection of to find out. However, there are, sad to say, even worse movies than these.

"Horrors of Spider Island"

A couple is hiring a bunch of dancers to go to Singapore. After some mildly racy scenes at the beginning of the movie (as in you see some panties), everyone hops on a twin engine propeller plane to head for Singapore. Somewhere along the line the plane gets four engines, and then it crashes in flames. Miraculously, the dancers and the couple survive. The pilots, of course, conveniently died.

Everyone survives to reach an island where they quickly discover a professor in a giant spider web, which yields the original German title, "Ein Toter hing im Netz," which is, roughly translated, a dead one hung in the net. Sadly, that scene was probably one of the high points in the movie. Soon women are shedding clothes, but the only living male on the island wanders off to be attacked by a giant spider. The giant spider was probably mutated by the uranium that may have been on the island, which is what the professor was seeking. Remember that in the 50s and 60s radiation explained nearly everything.

The food starts to run out and things are looking grim when a couple of fellows show up. Then there is steamy romance, the spider guy appears again, there is some running around and screaming and yelling, spider guy kills a couple of people, the movie ends, and you wonder what the heck it was all about. This movie is just too bland and boring to be very interesting. The picture quality is also poor.

For those who like trivia, this movie has apparently been released under a variety of names according to imdb:

"Ein Toter Hing im Netz"

"A Corpse Hangs in the Web"

"Body in the Web"

"Girls of Spider Island"

"Horrors of Spider Island"

"It's Hot in Paradise"

"The Spider's Web"

"The Wasp Woman"

We see scenes of bees at the start of this movie, and then a scientist-looking character, Eric Zinthrop (Michael Mark), captures a wasp nest. The excitement is so intense you can just feel it. Our scientist is fooling around with wasps while he is supposed to be working on royal jelly. The scientist gets fired (duh!) and encounters Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot in her last movie role; apparently "Wasp Woman" was the kiss of death for her movie career), the aging head of a cosmetics company. When I say aging, I mean she is in her 40s. She is very attractive, but apparently insufficiently attractive to sell cosmetics. Mr. Zinthrop convinces Janice that he can make her young by making a guinea pig young.

Mr. Zinthrop is involved in an accident and ends up being stuck in bed. Janice decides to start taking shots of royal jelly a bit quicker than Mr. Zinthrop had been giving them to her. Janice gets young really quick, but occasionally she gains a black face, claws and a nasty buzz in her voice. When this occurs, she tends to kill people and eat them, which most people would likely consider a serious side effect of Mr. Zinthrop's shots.

I would like to tell you that there are redeeming characteristics to this movie, but unless you are a hard-core Roger Corman fan, you should probably avoid this movie. The movie waits too long for the wasp woman to show up. When she does show up, Corman made up for the cheesy costume by using out-of-focus photography and brief flashes of the wasp woman. The ending was unsatisfying also. The wasp woman put up a really poor fight. After the big husky guys she killed and ate, you would have thought she could have put up a bigger fight at the end. Oh well. Just remember, there are lots of other cheesy movies waiting for you to watch.

"Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet"/"Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women"

In 1965 Roger Corman and a small gang of others took a Soviet movie, added some scenes with Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue, and created a reasonably serviceable science fiction movie title "Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet." There were some strange moments and a few funny moments, but the movie was a reasonably campy, low-budget science fiction film. Apparently someone (Corman perhaps) decided the movie was insufficiently schlocky and gave it one more shot.

In the original movie we see two groups of men wandering around Venus. The first group crashed and is trying to get rescued. The second group of men is trying to find the first group of men. As both groups wander around they encounter a cheesy looking reptilian bird, a deluge, and an erupting volcano. In the second movie Corman and director Peter Bogdanovich provide an explanation for these happenings; an explanation that probably would have been better left unexplained.

It turns out that there were a bunch of blond Barbie clones wandering the planet with telepathic powers and excessive chest development. These women, who spend a lot of time lying around with 60s-looking pants and shell tops, walk around acting like a coven of witches with too much makeup, false eyelashes, and too little in the way of prehistoric attributes. Mamie Van Doren, one of the three M's of the 50s and 60s (Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe included), is the leader of the Venusian blonde babes, who include a cluster of women who may have been so embarrassed by this movie that most of them never appeared in a film again.