I must confess, I don't recall ever having seen any of schlock producer Del Tenney's oeuvre prior to slipping this two-movie disk into my DVD player, but I'm always game for Mystery Science Theater 3000 fare.
The Horror of
The first movie, The Horror of Party Beach, is a monster musical a go-go, made in the early 1960s. It starts off with a bickering couple (he's the wooden, responsible one; she's the hard-drinking, hard-dancing hothead 30-year-old cast as a teen), segues to a Frankie-and-Annette styled beach party, then the camera pans down to what's on the bottom of the ocean. It's a radioactive spill that's reanimating the corpse of the long-lost sailor. The process is agonizingly slow, and the product is just plain agonizing, resulting in a monster that looks like The Creature From the Black Lagoon's funhouse mirror reflection.
Horribly dated dialogue throws down against even more horribly dated music (from the deplorable Del-Aires). The only saving grace is the brand new DVD commentary from Del Tenney, who's quite affable and amusing as he recounts the story of directing and producing The Horror of Party Beach and explains the whole concept of low-budget thrillers made almost specifically for the drive-in crowd.
The acting is quite bad, as is the cinematography and the production value. It's cheesy, but it's not cheesy fun. In short, The Horror of Party Beach has absolutely nothing going for it. If you like this sort of thing — mutants from the ocean attacking bikinied beach bimbos — I recommend you watch Roger Corman's Humanoids from the Deep (1980) instead.
The Curse of the Living Corpse
Needless to say, after viewing the above-referenced movie I was less than looking forward to the second flick on this disk, The Curse of the Living Corpse. This time, however, I was pleasantly surprised.
For one thing, the caliber of acting is in the stratosphere compared to The Horror of Party Beach. Here, we have the earliest cinematic performances from Candace Hilligoss of Carnival of Souls, and Roy Scheider in his screen debut. Experienced stage actors round out the cast (which is sometimes obvious, but not too distracting).
The story is very Poe'esque: Set in
Unfortunately, the timing of the Will reading is a little off: Without realizing it, some of the Sinclairs have already broken cardinal rules. Soon enough, a shrouded figure is skulking all over the place committing murder and mayhem. When a beautiful blonde servant girl's head winds up on a serving platter, the fun has just begun.
All the clichés are here, though tepid by today's standards: You have sex (in Rufus's crypt, no less!) you die. You drink alcohol, you die. You decide to shuck the dress and take a hot bath in the middle of the melee, you die. The cloaked figure is, of course, never revealed so we don't know if it's the megalomaniac Rufus, a greedy heir, or the canny lawyer wanting all the cash — oh, yes we do. But that's OK!
The Curse of the Living Corpse doesn't have a lot of flair or suspense (the unguarded dialogue gives everything away in the first 10 minutes), yet there's enough Gothic elements to keep the viewer interested as the story winds down and the body count goes up. Sure, it's formulaic, but The Curse of the Living Corpse does deliver on being a briskly paced little drawing-room whodunit.
The brand new commentary, from Tenney and an unidentified interviewer, is quite good. It's an interesting and entertaining peek inside the low-budget filmmaking of yore, long before CGI and the Internet.
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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson