TEENAGE TERRORS: BAD MOVIES

With only a few more days left in Halloween Month, Balladeer’s Blog serves up another seasonal post.

I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN (1957) – Herbert Strock’s follow-up to I Was a Teenage Werewolf always calls to mind the Movie Host shows of the past and the way they would often pair up those two Teen Monster flicks as a Double Feature the nearest Saturday night to Halloween.

Whit Bissell returns, this time in the role of Professor Frankenstein, whose mad experiments caused him to be driven from Continental Europe to England and from there to the U.S. He still believes his ancestor’s theories were solid and he continues those ghastly efforts. 

Frankenstein grabs corpses to experiment on wherever he can, including robbing the graves of teen athletes or using the dead bodies of teen victims of hotrod racing accidents. (Hey, how much more 1950s can you get?) Anyway, it’s a car crash that gives the Prof access to the final parts he needs.

Gary Conway, best known for Land of the Giants, had one of the bodies used by Frankenstein. Conway’s face was shown only for part of the film, as once the Prof’s monster was completed he was left with the bizarrely ugly mug that adorned the movie posters.

Bissell’s character is even more unlikable here than he was in Strock’s werewolf flick. Not only is he callously indifferent to the affections of his lab assistant played by Phyllis Coates, but he coldly plays on his monster’s desire for a normal face to make him commit vile deeds for him. 

Professor Frankenstein’s laboratory sports a trap door above the vicious alligator pit to which he feeds the remains of his failed experiments. This movie is far worse than I Was a Teenage Werewolf, which is why I prefer it. And the final couple minutes are pointlessly in COLOR, which adds to the Bad Movie fun.

I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF (1957) – Michael Landon, always possessed of a good sense of humor, loved to joke about his starring role in this Golden Turkey when he was on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

You’ll find yourself speculating on what kind of screen villain Landon might have made when you see his hilariously unhinged performance as juvenile delinquent Tony Rivers. Tony’s given to psychotic rages and eating raw meat even before he gets experimented on by Whit Bissell’s mad scientist character Dr. Alfred Brandon.   

Dr. Brandon’s cockamamie belief is that reviving humanity’s long-buried primal ferocity will let us all survive the “inevitable” nuclear war by turning us into science-spawned werewolves. It makes no sense, but the filmmakers would explore such Cold War Era Atomic Cafe themes in another Teen Monster flick the same year.   

At any rate, Yvonne Lime plays Landon’s mousey girlfriend Arlene and Guy Williams himself shows up as a police officer. Critics still enjoy citing parallels between Tony’s lycanthropic ordeal and puberty, when a young man can find himself growing hairier and battling with dramatic temperamental changes.

That point is REALLY driven home by the scene when Landon’s transformation into werewolf form is triggered by getting turned on as he watches a female gymnast in tights do her thing. Surely it’s no spoiler this many years later to mention that the film does not wimp out with a happy ending for Tony after the body count his furry alter ego racks up. 

BLOOD OF DRACULA (1957) – This little honey will be forever remembered as the movie that SHOULD have been called I Was a Teenage Vampire. We’ve got Herbert Strock and Malcolm Atterbury again, plus the cowriter of 1957’s other two Teen Monster flicks and a storyline that uses I Was a Teenage Werewolf as its template.

For a change of pace, however, this time it’s a female teenager who gets experimented on by an older mad scientist. Sandra Harrison stars as Nancy Perkins, a typical mixed-up teen trying to make sense of life and her maturing body.

Our heroine is lured toward life as a vampiric Guinea pig by Miss Branding (Louise Lewis), one of her teachers at school. The scenes with Nancy and Miss Branding have an odd lesbian grooming subtext to them and film geeks still argue over whether or not it was intentional or just hilariously coincidental.

And not only is the last name Branding lazily similar to Whit Bissell’s Dr. Brandon from the Michael Landon film, but the half-baked reason for turning Nancy into a vampire is the same. Miss Branding is trying to turn our heroine into a scientifically formed vamp because she believes that transforming humanity into science-spawned vampires is the only way we’ll be able to survive the “inevitable” nuclear war. 

In any event, your 1950s Teen Monster experience wouldn’t be complete without Blood of Dracula. We get Nancy’s vampire pioneering the Eddie Munster look, we get a Reform School Girl style “bullying the new girl” scene when Nancy arrives at her new school AND we get another 50s rock and roll song on the soundtrack.

For I Was a Teenage Werewolf it was Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Mo, and for Blood of Dracula it was Puppy Love, but NOT the Donny Osmond piece. Anyway, at just 69 minutes this movie goes by like the wind. 

TEENAGE ZOMBIES (1959) – Jerry Warren, who was sort of Roger Corman but without the charm or business savvy, decided to cash in on the Teen Monster fad of the late 1950s with this movie. Warren is best known for buying and indifferently translating Mexican horror films for U.S. distribution, but he also dabbled in some of his own Golden Turkeys. 

Teenage Zombies stars Don Sullivan, famous for The Giant Gila Monster, The Monster of Piedras Blancas and Beatsville (aka The Rebel Set). This time around he plays Regg, leader of a group of teens whose water-skiing fun leads to them discovering an “uncharted” island which, absurdly enough, is just off the coast of the United States!   

The teens become captives of the island’s female mad scientist Dr. Myra, portrayed by Psychotronic cult actress Katherine Victor. Dr. Myra is working for a Communist country to develop nerve gas that can turn huge numbers of people into obedient zombies. Her employers plan to use it in a plot to conquer the U.S.

The villainess has the teen foursome tossed into cages to become her next human test subjects for her zombie formula. The process is far from perfected and so far Dr. Myra’s hulking lackey Ivan (above left) is the only successful subject.

There’s also a caged ape – well, really just a guy in a VERY cheap costume. Meanwhile, a few friends of our lead quartet of teens try to get the skeptical adult authorities on the mainland to look into Regg and company’s disappearance.

In the end, Dr. Myra and her cohorts are defeated by Regg and his pals. The Communist plot is thwarted and our heroic teens are set to be personally congratulated by the President of the United States. You’d think it would be impossible to make a movie like this dull, but Jerry Warren managed it.

TEENAGE MONSTER (1958) – Even among the subgenre of 1950s Teen Monster schlock, this production – also released as Meteor Monster – is justly considered bottom of the barrel. A simple-minded farm boy in the old west stumbles across a freshly downed meteor and soon finds himself transforming into a hairy, Sasquatch style/ werewolf-type creature.

The boy’s mother tries to hide her son’s secret when the townspeople start seeking the Dan Haggerty-looking beast terrorizing the area. The novelty of the western setting helps to make this formula monster movie worth at least one look, but in my opinion it’s just not fun-bad enough to merit a cult following.

More boring-bad than enjoyably bad, Teenage Monster was a missed opportunity.

And, not to brag, but just like this meteor beast I’ve often been called Wild! Wanton! and Weird! myself. (I’m kidding!)

HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER (1958) – Herbert Strock struck again with this AIP film which went meta in the kind of way that Scream wouldn’t do for another four decades! Gary Conway was back as the Teenage Frankenstein Monster, but Gary Clarke replaced Michael Landon as the Teenage Werewolf. The Teenage Vampire got stiffed again, as she was omitted from the film.

Robert Harris starred as Pete Dumond, an American International makeup master like Paul Blaisdell. The studio is bought by new money men, who decide to stop making horror movies and fire everybody attached to them.

There’s still a little time until the takeover is official, so Dumond takes advantage. American International is (fictionally) making a flick pitting Teenage Werewolf against Teenage Frankenstein so Pete, suddenly a chemical genius, mixes brain-washing ingredients in with his makeup.

Dumond then does elaborate makeup jobs on the two men playing the teenage monsters and has them start killing off the people he blames for losing his job. They must obey him thanks to the will-numbing makeup. (Why was Katherine Victor wasting her time with nerve gas when she could have just used Pete’s chemically altered makeup for her Teenage Zombies?)

Viewers get to see the two teen monsters run up another body count with Dumond getting into the act at one point in a sort of Teenage Ape-Monster mask. The final minutes were in color, just like in the Teen Frankenstein flick. 

There are several recognizable movie props from low-budget productions as Easter Eggs, plus Malcolm Atterbury AND another goofy rock song – You Gotta Have Eee-Ooo – sung by teen star John Ashley himself at his Elvis sound-alike best. See below, and don’t miss that final move from the ladies: 

FOR MY EXAMINATION OF OLD WEST THEMED HORROR MOVIES FROM THE 50s TO THE 80s CLICK HERE.