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jere7myToday I walked through the park; a baseball team of teenagers was holding batting practice on the diamond, and a white butterfly was jigging over the dandelions. Spring is, provisionally, here.
I was on my way to town, where I bought some Men's Pocky, then met Kendra and screened The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra for the two of us. We both enjoyed it a great deal; the dinner scene had tears of laughter running down our cheeks. For a fan of B movies like myself, this rang so close to true I felt transported back in time...except when I wasn't.
The movie, if you don't know, is a shot-perfect recreation of the 50s drive-in B monster movie—and was shot in two weeks, for added verisimilitude. There are aliens (one of whom is eerily reminiscent of Criswell); there is a mutant; there is a talking skeleton; there is a good scientist, and an evil scientist; there is a sexy cat-girl who performs an interpretive dance. (Obviously a "cat"-girl, despite the fact that she was created from four forest animals, none of which were feline.) The props and FX are all period—no CGI here, just wires and emulsion scratches and a caulking gun called into service as a ray gun. Even the unmatched film stock and the changeover marks are lifted straight from Bride of the Monster. The dialogue is steered with beautiful ineptitude from hackneyed humor to pseudo-philosophy; shots last a few seconds longer than they should, or cut out too soon. Oh, it's masterful.
The obvious inspiration was Plan 9, but there are touches from all over the genre, like the breathtaking pan over...foliage. I was hoping for more flaws, like bad day-for-night shots and continuity errors, but they might have been too obvious. (There were some real continuity errors—like the digital watch the mad scientist was wearing—which serve to blur the line between subject, homage, and parody a little further.)
If I were going to point out a flaw, it would be an identity crisis: it was about 90% homage to Ed Wood and Samuel Z. Arkoff and 10% Saturday Night Live parody, and the two modes clashed. It slipped into self-awareness a few times—"Hey, look, weren't these old movies silly?" instead of "What you are seeing is true." I'm thinking particularly of the Skeleton's too-modern insult-riff dialogue (which could have come from a Cartoon Network script) and an exchange between the aliens and the evil scientist that went on and on and on, beyond the bounds of bad movie dialogue and into the realm of Airplane!
Still, with a little trimming, Lost Skeleton could pass as a legitimate 50s B movie, even under fairly close inspection, and that's an achievement. For a lover of B-movie goodness, it's a bounty.
(This page of (real) production notes is quite a hoot, and quite reminiscent of the real thing. E.g.: Why does the skeleton have that odd lump on its head? The plastic skeleton they bought came with a brass bolt in its head, which had to be covered with Sculpy. The nifty "smoking meteor" effect was an accident—the lightbulb they used to make it glow was too hot, and slowly burned the meteor from the inside.)
I was on my way to town, where I bought some Men's Pocky, then met Kendra and screened The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra for the two of us. We both enjoyed it a great deal; the dinner scene had tears of laughter running down our cheeks. For a fan of B movies like myself, this rang so close to true I felt transported back in time...except when I wasn't.
The movie, if you don't know, is a shot-perfect recreation of the 50s drive-in B monster movie—and was shot in two weeks, for added verisimilitude. There are aliens (one of whom is eerily reminiscent of Criswell); there is a mutant; there is a talking skeleton; there is a good scientist, and an evil scientist; there is a sexy cat-girl who performs an interpretive dance. (Obviously a "cat"-girl, despite the fact that she was created from four forest animals, none of which were feline.) The props and FX are all period—no CGI here, just wires and emulsion scratches and a caulking gun called into service as a ray gun. Even the unmatched film stock and the changeover marks are lifted straight from Bride of the Monster. The dialogue is steered with beautiful ineptitude from hackneyed humor to pseudo-philosophy; shots last a few seconds longer than they should, or cut out too soon. Oh, it's masterful.
The obvious inspiration was Plan 9, but there are touches from all over the genre, like the breathtaking pan over...foliage. I was hoping for more flaws, like bad day-for-night shots and continuity errors, but they might have been too obvious. (There were some real continuity errors—like the digital watch the mad scientist was wearing—which serve to blur the line between subject, homage, and parody a little further.)
If I were going to point out a flaw, it would be an identity crisis: it was about 90% homage to Ed Wood and Samuel Z. Arkoff and 10% Saturday Night Live parody, and the two modes clashed. It slipped into self-awareness a few times—"Hey, look, weren't these old movies silly?" instead of "What you are seeing is true." I'm thinking particularly of the Skeleton's too-modern insult-riff dialogue (which could have come from a Cartoon Network script) and an exchange between the aliens and the evil scientist that went on and on and on, beyond the bounds of bad movie dialogue and into the realm of Airplane!
Still, with a little trimming, Lost Skeleton could pass as a legitimate 50s B movie, even under fairly close inspection, and that's an achievement. For a lover of B-movie goodness, it's a bounty.
(This page of (real) production notes is quite a hoot, and quite reminiscent of the real thing. E.g.: Why does the skeleton have that odd lump on its head? The plastic skeleton they bought came with a brass bolt in its head, which had to be covered with Sculpy. The nifty "smoking meteor" effect was an accident—the lightbulb they used to make it glow was too hot, and slowly burned the meteor from the inside.)
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Men's Pocky
Date: 2004-04-24 12:13 am (UTC)Re: Men's Pocky
Date: 2004-04-24 03:52 am (UTC)Re: Men's Pocky
Date: 2004-04-26 10:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-26 03:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-26 05:43 pm (UTC)It's an interesting question. I remember one moment in the movie which I would have thought an homage if the wife had stopped talking, but clearly became parody when she continued:
"Something's wrong. It's not something I can see, or touch, or hear. It's just something I can't quite see." That much would have been homage; I can easily imagine a scriptwriter churning out that line without realizing how it would sound. But she went on: "...can't quite see. Or touch. Or hear." That made it a little too self-aware, I thought.