"The Dark"(1979)d/John "Bud" Cardos

Nothing says seventies sci-fi quite like a nifty pair o' lazar beam eyes(dig the old dramatic spelling there, would you?).Why, you could even take a script that originally focused on a supernatural, demonic entity doin' the snuffin' off of folks, that might be helmed by a genre vet like, sayyyy...Tobe Hooper, fire him, bring in an old stunt man-turned-director like Bud Cardos, of "Kingdom of the Spiders" fame to complete it halfway through, with the mentality that the film would be better served with a more sci-fi tinge, to compete with all the recent space alien-based box office hits of the day and slap together a last minute patch job cash grab and wheel away with 'barrows and 'barrows of long green before audiences even realized what hit them.All it needed was some lazar beam eyes.Kids grooved on those, didn't they? Just like action slacks and Supertramp albums.
You could almost imagine Ed Montoro and Dick Clark, the producers of tonight's entry, discussing the direction this film was about to go in, and how everyone involved would be better off for it.Only, things didn't exactly go according to their plans.Neither man ended up blowing a silver platter worth of nasal confectionaries with six half-nude Solid Gold dancers in the Studio 54 bathroom due to this movie's release, it's safe to say.They ended up with a lethargic, muddled, uninteresting, sloppy mess that would have died completely forgotten if the folks at Shriek Show didn't emptyheadedly roll out the red carpet and give this gas-filled toilet bowl floater the special edition dvd treatment nearly thirty years later.Naturally, genre hungry fans unfamiliar with the title, pre-order the disc with hopes on high,then see what they've actually been conned into buying, then drop it off at the local dvd Buy/Sell/Trade for about a dollar and a half worth of store credit, where the disc is eventually picked up by Uncle Wop, who's familiar with it, for about four bucks.I endure the thing yet one more time(after enduring it in the cable box days at least two or three times),cull my screenshots,and throw together my review, so that nobody else makes the same mistake the early bird dvd buyer did.The more I think about it, four bucks is pretty steep for what's served up here...

Lazar beam eyes! The kids'll think it's outta sight.
Santa Monica residents start turning up mutilated and beheaded(off camera,of course, how this PG fare ever merited an R from the MPAA remains a mystery), one a night, thanks to a powerful, unknown entity the local press has dubbed "The Mangler".Detective Mooney(Richard Jaeckel)gets a hot tip from an eccentric, elderly psychic named DeRenzy who's seen visions of one of the unearthly killer's next victims,a young, nameless, would-be actor she met briefly at a groovy boat party.Mooney laughs off her prophetic warnings, and chooses to threaten an author named Warner(Bill Devane),the father of the first victim, who he'd sent to prison years earlier, instead.Warner looks like a skeevy piece of street crud, rocking a headband, Foster Grants, and bellbottoms while zipping around town in a convertible Corvette thanks to his writing skills, and vowing to one up the police task force with his own amateur investigation.The kindly old psychic goes home and has a stroke for her troubles.Then there's Zoe Owens(Cathy Lee "That's Incredible" Crosby),a television reporter with unrealized dreams of covering a hard news story, and her dissuading producer(Keenan Wynn) who tries to keep a lid on the sensational crimes unfolding before their very (non-Lazar)eyes.The cops have nothing.Even a conference with a pathologist(Casey Kasem) produces no results, other than identifying the skin color of the murderer. That'd be grey, for the record.

"Yeah, this is Warner(Bill Devane),whattaya mean my masculinity checked out the second I put this robe on??!!"
Warner plods around his digs in the gaudiest sissy bathrobe ever committed to celluloid, before pitching an impromptu partnership to the the reporter, who not only grooves on the idea of combining resources with the pug-faced ex-con, but also gives him some pussy for God-knows-what-reason along the way.Huh?? Maybe it was Corvette rides.Meanwhile the cops fumble over a growing number of crime scenes, talking about beheaded victims who were clearly disintegrated by ocular rays of some sort. Perhaps Lazar beam eyes.Plot continuity? We don't need no stinking plot continuity.Warner and Owens visit the psychic, who's been lying around her devastated flat in stroke-throes for what seems like an hour now,just in time to hear her twisted yap struggle with her earlier prophecy about the unknown actor again.If they can manage to hunt down this young man, they'll eventually come face-to-face with the murderer himself.Some ninety pointless minutes later, in a warehouse surrounded by policemen, they get their wish.The killer(John Bloom)is an eight foot tall, long haired, grey-faced alien, who happens to be wearing a flannel shirt, jeans, and work boots for some unexplained reason.The cops' bullets have no effect on the space invader-turned-construction worker(?), who shoots lazar beams from his eyes.After several minutes of lazar explosions and gunfire,Warner casually strolls up to the thing and sets it on fire, causing it to explode into nothing.In the end, even a narrator comes in and explains that not every alien encounter will make sense, exactly the way this one didn't.

Well,there you have it. Keep your squamous epithelium based with underlying lamina and keep reaching for keratinocytes.
Cardos, who, in his stunt heyday, played one of the junkyard bullies in Psych-Out(1968), went on to direct ten motion pictures, and we've already covered the only real noteworthy one here.Devane, who's probably best remembered for his work on Knot's Landing, works steadily in television to this day,and the same goes for Crosby,who never really made the leap to the big screen herself.She could probably lay most of the blame on this movie.The late Jaeckel saw a lot of genre action as a favorite of William Grefe' and Billy Girdler, acting in fare like Grizzly,Day of the Animals,and Mako:Jaws of Death.Seven foot four inch Bloom, who got his start in exploitation icon Al Adamson fare at the outset of the seventies with titles like Dracula vs. Frankenstein, Brain of Blood, and The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, before getting a chance in mainstream movies like Bachelor Party and The Great Outdoors, passed away twelve years ago this month at the age of fifty-four.Sadly, tonight's movie can't be a high point in the career of anybody involved.On the scale, one single wop, and that's only because I'm kinda zooted, and feeling generous-like at the moment...

Watch out for those lazar beams, coming from the eyes! He's got lazar beam eyes!

"The Incredible Melting Man"(1977)d/William Sachs

Long before FX master Rick Baker won accolades for "An American Werewolf in London"(1981) or "Harry and the Hendersons"(1988),he toiled away in low budget flicks like John Landis' "Schlock!"(1971),"Octaman"(1974),and this William Sachs film,to the delight of little horror nuts like myself.Lately he's been toiling away in crappy Eddie Murphy movies,but the guy is a true artist,regardless of whether he's associated with "Norbit"(2007)or not.Some memorable cult cameos include Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith,Janus Blythe(Ruby from "The Hills Have Eyes"(1977)),and Jonathan Demme,who later directed "Silence of the Lambs"(1992)!

Truly scary fatso nurse runs directly at the camera in slo-mo.Terrifying.
So they send a team of astronauts to Saturn,despite the fact that the planet is a ball of gas and has no surface whatsoever to land on,you with me so far?When the rocket closes in on its target,some wiseguy has transformed the planet's normally icy rings into firey ones,causing a strange phenomenon to occur.Steve West(Alex Rebar) bugs his eyes out looking at stock footage of solar flares and gets a slight nose bleed.Yeah,he's in all kinds of trouble when he somehow returns to Mother Earth.Doctors back home know these symptoms all too well,explaining that the heavily bandaged man in the hospital bed has started to melt like a pint of Turkey Hill Moose Tracks ice cream.Naturally the doomed astronaut gets out of his bed,unwraps himself,and takes a gander in the mirror.His rugged seventies looks...his porn stache...turkey sandwiches,turkey stew,gone,all gone!Bumpuses!Sons a' bitches!Sorry,wrong movie.Anyways,he goes crackers and a rotund nurse gallops down a long hallway in slo-mo,screaming(and no doubt wheezing from the exercise)as she smashes through a glass door.The titular melting man has been unleashed on an unsuspecting local populace.Since he's dripping all over the place,he needs "cells" from his victims,which he obtains by partially eating them.Makes sense.

The finest decapitated head cascading over a waterfall and smashing on the rocks below in slo-mo I have ever seen.
So Melty wanders around searching for victims to eat to slow his melting process,and thanks to the massive continuity problems of the film,dusk becomes the middle of the afternoon,and then back to night.Mindless fans of films like "Men in Black" might not notice such a faux pas,but I digress.He stumbles onto a fisherman in the wilderness,and dispatches him off-camera,but not before he can send the angler's decapitated,bloody head downstream,where it goes over a waterfall and dashes on the jagged rocks below,all in beautiful slo-mo.He then interrupts a group of well supervised little kids,who playfully smoke cigarettes together,and spares them,knowing the cancer will take them all out in years to come more painfully than a melting,flesh-eating astronaut ever could.He also snuffs a couple of lemon-thieving horny old codgers.No,I didn't make that up.He inadvertently interrupts a photographer and his comely,young subject(provocatively portrayed by the late Cheryl Smith)as he struggles to wrestle her tube top down so he can photograph her chachabingos against her will(artistic license,sexual assault,all the same).She backs into a disembodied arm whose hand grabs her ankle.Even disembodied body parts love boobs.

What's cooler than little kids smoking? Nothing,that's what.
Meanwhile,in the world of folks who aren't currently melting all over their groovy leisure suits,Steve's best friend,Dr.Ted Nelson is distraught over his friend's low drippy state and the fact that he's got no crackers in his house.No,I didn't make that up either.To make matters worse,a NASA general eats his last turkey leg,then West scarfs down Nelson's in-laws(the aforementioned oldies who're out trying to heist lemons).At least the guy isn't melting,right?Out of crackers,turkey legs, and in-laws,the good doctor sets out to find his snot-like chum before it's too late.

Astronaut Steve West needs a nip and tuck,courtesy of FX wizard Rick Baker.
In the finale,Nelson finds the melting man at the local power plant,surrounded by cops who plan on filling the oozing astronaut full of lead.He pleads for West's life and gives the lawmen his credentials.The cops naturally shoot the doctor instead.Also not made up,folks.The enraged melting man converges on the absent-minded cops who shoot him to no effect.He kills the officers,throwing one onto some power lines below,electrocuting him real good.Then he finds a comfy wall to fully melt away into nothing against.The next day,a black custodian cleans up the astronaut pudding as a radio announces another mission to Saturn about to take place.Oh sweet irony.

The late,great Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith,topless,as usual.
A pretty good,if somewhat disjointed time to be had revisiting this one,kiddies.Baker's makeup and gore effects(!) are pretty effective for their time,the logic-bereaft script contains several good unintentional laughs,and it all moves along quickly and painlessly.You could do worse than sitting down to this one,like...for example,"Octaman"(1974) or even worse,"Norbit"(2007).Sorry,Eddie.

Clean up in aisle nine...