I watched The Unearthly yesterday, and really have a feeling of deja vu. I think I watched it a long time ago, before I decided to watch the entire series from the beginning.
Anyway, this movie had two great short films for kids, one about posture with inappropriate teacher-student contact, and one about appreciating your parents.
The Unearthly is about a doctor that is working on a miracle gland that will grant eternal life, but he just can’t get the knack of installing it into people, they end up disfigured and crazy. His friend, another doctor, “refers” patients without any family to him to further the experiments. What this doctor friend got out of the deal was unclear. One of the guests figures things out and tries to help the others escape.
I have to give this movie five empty seats to represent Tor Johnson’s classic (and stinger) line “Time for go to bed.”
War of the Colossal Beast is the sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man, by virtue of using the same-named main character. They had a different actor portray the colossal man, who after his fall from the Hoover Dam in the last movie somehow survived though he became horribly disfigured in the process. He emigrates to Mexico where he raids trucks for food.
Glen (the main character) has a sister that believes he is still alive. She hears a rumor about a missing truck in Mexico and somehow connects this with her brother. She travels down there, locates him, but finds him crazy and rampaging through the countryside. With help from the local police and US Army, they bake bread with drugs in the loaves and trick Glen into eating it so they can capture him and return him to the US. He breaks free, is recaptured, and breaks free again to terrorize an observatory and a bus full of junior high school students. His sister finally breaks through his craziness and Glen chooses to electrocute himself on high tension power lines rather than continue his horrible existence.
I rate this movie two empty seats, one for the original actor that played Glen and one for his girlfriend, who apparently abandoned him and was not seen in this film.
Perhaps the most disturbing short film ever produced, Mr. B Natural, precedes this film. First off, “Mr” is definitely a “Mrs” and has an annoying habit of popping up in young boys’ bedrooms. It’s a total sales film for Conn, a musical instrument manufacturer, and the stinger for this episode was appropriately chosen from this short and not the actual movie.