I WAS A TEENAGE TIME LORD

I WAS A TEENAGE TIME LORD – In the style of Tom Baker & Jon Pertwee Doctor Who episodes and vintage Golden Turkeys of the past with faint undertones of old movie host shows comes this self-indulgent blog post.

Back when I was 12 or 13 years old and was getting heavily into really old, bad movies I combined that interest with my fondness for schlocky original series Doctor Who episodes. The result was much younger me lazily picturing myself in the Big Bug, Cheap Monster and Goofy Alien films from the 1950s or 1960s and earlier.   

I never pictured myself as a Teenage Time Lord exactly, I just used that title for this blog post to capture the feel of ridiculous 50s flicks like I Was a Teenage Werewolf, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and others.

My imaginary character wasn’t an alien from Gallifrey or anything, he was just from Earth of the future and wound up stranded in the past. His futuristic science kept him from aging, and he spent his time helping human beings battle weird menaces.

In other words, whatever actions the hero of the movie was involved in, my imaginary counterpart was really the one doing them, dressed in sunglasses, an Indiana Jones hat and a baggy three-quarter length coat. No TARDIS of course, just the surviving segment of the crashed time machine in which he had traveled to the past, which served as my/ his mobile lab.   

Some of the Psychotronic movies in which I used to half-insert my fictional alter ego long, long ago:

FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER (1965) – This black & white film is on many people’s lists of the worst movies ever made, so it was a dream come true for young me. Martian women have been rendered sterile from the radiation of the planet’s nuclear war.

        The Red Planet’s Princess Marcuzan, her chief scientist Nadir and some troops have come to Earth, where they abduct nubile women vacationing in Puerto Rico to use as breeding stock. The aliens are opposed by a heroic android astronaut called Frank, supposedly short for First Robot Astronaut Corps.

The half-melted android (after crashing his craft) battles the aliens to save Earth ladies, ultimately fighting the space monster the Martians brought with them. For a couple minutes, anyway.

Sounds like a comedy … stings like a bee! All that plus groovy rock songs, too, in this 79-minute schlocker.

ROBOT MONSTER (1953) – Another film on people’s worst movies ever made list. One lone ape-man in a diving helmet comes down from the moon and, on behalf of his lunar race, wipes out nearly all of humanity. That “robot monster” is called Ro-Man and he brought along dinosaur-type monsters who are really just stock footage from the old movie One Million B.C. 

The few human survivors amid the ruins are a pack of thoroughly annoying assholes who make you long to see them all dead, even the children. In fact, ESPECIALLY the children.

George Nader, who always portrayed smug pricks in movies, was in rare form here as one of the adult survivors. He’s the male lead here, who tries to take down Ro-Man when he starts feeling frisky toward George’s scientist woman. 

Little makes sense and I wouldn’t have it any other way! The “Post-Apocalyptic Lawrence Welk Bubble Machine Polka” ending along with a weird temporal anomaly that it would take a Teenage Time Lord to figure out make this mess of a flick immortal. 66 minutes.  

FROM HELL IT CAME (1957) – The theme of worst movie ever made candidates continues here, but at least it’s not extraterrestrials as the heavies this time. Radiation from A-bomb tests and black magic combine to spawn a walking tree monster animated by the spirit of the wronged leader of a native village on a South Seas island.

The monster looks like a cross between a Sesame Street character  and the mascot of a sports team (“The Fighting Elms”). Seriously, if you can look at this thing and NOT laugh you have no sense of humor. 

The usual assortment of bland white characters, stiff military & scientist figures and one-dimensional natives struggle to stay alive against this arboreal menace on the loose. 71 minutes.

THE CREEPING TERROR (1964) – A spaceship lands on Earth and unleashes a monster who looks like a long carpet draped over a line of people crawling on all fours. The bio-mechanical beastie devours every human being it encounters despite the fact that it moves so slowly and awkwardly that even Daleks could outrun it.  

After an eternity of voice-over narration and repetitious scenes of people falling victim to the creature it gets destroyed only to have the spaceship unleash ANOTHER one of the synthetic beasts from its belly.

The story about the scam behind the making of this film would make a great movie on its own and can be found in the Medved Brothers’ classic books on Golden Turkeys. The musical number at the Dance Hall stays with you, mostly because it’s played over and over again ad nauseum. 77 minutes. 

THE KILLER SHREWS (1959) – Nineteen Fifty-Nine was a very good year for Golden Turkeys. This latest entry on our list features a gathering of hopeless alcoholics stuck on an island where they must battle giant shrews that were spawned by the typical mad scientist shenanigans.

The giant shrews are really just dogs with VERY poor shrew costumes casually draped over them. Expect the usual bits with the characters fighting among themselves while trying to stay alive, but this time with LOTS more drinking and way too much Festus and Roscoe P. Coltrane, since Ken Curtis and James Best are the stars. 

The “escape in overturned metal barrels” scene is so hilariously awkward it must be seen to be believed. 69 minutes.

TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE (1959) – Yet another flick from that milestone year. Extraterrestrial teenagers who look even older than the faux teenagers on Happy Days come to Earth in a spaceship, wielding their cool ray-guns that reduce living things to their skeletons. 

Our planet will make a wonderful breeding ground for their chief food source, called gargans, who will overrun the world and devour all life-forms as they grow. Gargans are really just gigantic lobsters, well, actually they are the SHADOWS of lobsters projected on the film to look gigantic. 

The aliens’ plan to use our world to raise their free-range gargans is thwarted when one of their own falls in love with an Earth girl and wants to save us. 86 excruciating minutes.

PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1957) – The Golden Turkey that pretty much embodies the saying “so bad it’s good” for many people. 

Aliens who think Earthlings are too violent to be trusted plan to resurrect the dead as zombies to wipe us out. They only ever revive three dead people, so their plan never gets far.  The ET’s are defeated in their attempt to destroy us before we can discover the secret of “solarinite” (or “solonite” as the lame hero says) technology.

Far too much has been written about this movie for me to add anything new at this point. Not even about Bela Lugosi, Tor Johnson and Vampira. 79 minutes. 

*** Needless to say, there were countless others, like The Giant Claw, which I reviewed in one of my other blog posts recently and which featured a giant buzzard from outer space. Plus … 

They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1968) – Nazi war criminals have preserved Hitler’s entire head, not just his brain, as part of their plans to launch a Fourth Reich and conquer the world. Another flick shown on virtually every single Bad Movie Show ever made.

The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) – An army officer gets exposed to radiation from an experimental bomb and it causes him to grow and grow up to sixty feet tall! In the end he rampages through Las Vegas.  

The Slime People (1963) – Slimy humanoid monsters from beneath the Earth attack the surface world by isolating a major city via their secret weapon – fast-hardening fog.

Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) – On a remote island being used for atomic testing, radiation causes crabs to mutate to gigantic size. They feed on human beings, and are then able to speak in their late victims’ voices. See also Giant Leeches, Giant Scorpions, Giant Grasshoppers, Giant Ants and many more.