"Zaat"(1975)d/Don Barton

Move over Creature from the Black Lagoon and Monster of Piedras Blancas,there's a new rubbersuited amphibious sheriff in town.Well,maybe if the town had a population of like,five,that might work out.Zaat is by far the single greatest "mad-scientist-plans-species-domination-by-transforming-himself-into-a-human-walking-catfish" movie I have ever seen,bar none.Zaat is kinda like what it might be like to make "Black Lagoon" with no actors,and an overall budget of about seventy-five bucks.Some people might shy away from tackle a project of such epic proportions made for a week of factory pay shot over a period of three years,but not Don fucking Barton.Some directors might say to themselves,"You know,we've put some obvious dime store fangs into our creature costume,maybe we shouldn't let it clock too much on-screen time."Not Don fucking Barton.His lens lovingly follows the human walking catfish whether he's oafishly climbing out of the water like he's three sheets to the wind,or sluggishly swimming after his potential future catfish-frau,who could outswim the thing doing a one-handed backstroke.Andy Milligan himself might call Barton inept,were he alive to endure Barton's clumsy effort.Few films miss the mark so completely that they transcend the odor of their own stench,and entertain the way that Zaat does.If I had Barton in front of me(or you happen to be reading out there,DB),once I finished wiping the tears of laughter away,I'd have to ask him one question,that I'd expect him to answer totally honestly:Dude,what the fuck were you on and what the fuck were you thinking!

It ain't every day you get CTFOed in your living room by a human walking catfish.
After a snazzy folk song whose lyrics call for revenge on your friends(second only to Island of Death's catchy tune),we meet Dr. Leopold(Marshall Grauer),who has abandoned hope for the rest of the human race,and has produced a formula that will allow him to rise above his skeptical peers,mixing mankind with the perfect form of marine life,forever replacing hobbled old nutbags who shuffle around sparse laboratory sets all day.Whale?No.Shark?Nope.Dolphin?Uh uh.Killer Whale?Not even close.Those of you who said "human walking-catfish",what the hell are you on and what the hell is wrong with you!He explains this through an endless and introspective echo-heavy voice-over,with lines like,"Sargassum,the weed of deceit.Sargassum fish,the mighty hunter of the deep."Now I'm no ichthyologist by anyone's standards,but calling a four inch long frogfish the "mighty hunter of the deep",that there's crazy talk.Leopold consults a huge paper zodiac wheel of fish transformation and mating notes on the wall,that looks like it was drawn up by two teenaged high school chicks on bad acid with felt markers,and turns knobs and flicks switches on a lot of low-tech equipment that serve no purpose other than flashing lights and electronic noise.He looks at a lot of stock footage of fish from documentaries as though it was in the aquarium tanks in his lab,when it obviously isn't.He jabs a fake patch of skin that's supposed to be his own arm with a hypo full of his compound,Z sub a A sub T,or ZaAt,then submerges himself on a pulley-operated metal gurney into a large tank filled with the stuff.It's a tank of water,couldn't he just climb in and save himself the trouble?What comes out a few seconds later,well that's something else entirely.

"I don't give a good goddamn what the zodiac wheel says,boy.We AIN'T compatible!"
When Leopold gets a load of himself in the mirror,"Not at all like the catfish!" is a bit of an understatement.He looks like a rubbery,algae covered mix of seahorse and anteater with clear plastic eyes and bright red lipstick surrounding his dimestore plastic Dracula fangs.He immediately goes out and awkwardly swims amongst the octopi and sea turtles indigenous to most Florida lakes,squirting ZaAt into the water with his little red squirt bottle.Next on his human-walking catfish world domination to-do list is to eradicate his doubting Thomas colleagues which proves to be pretty easy,since there's only two of 'em,and they both seem to like to go fishing.In the meantime,he spots a comely young camper on the shore of the lake,who he later kidnaps,before failing miserably in attempt to turn her into a walking she-fish when his low tech equipment goes on the fritz,transforming her corpse into half seaweed,half dead bimbo in a yellow bikini.The sheriff,besieged by reports of catfish flopping around on the road and gasping for air,and hilarious shots of a walking catfish lunging forward on a miniature set complete with tiny fence to show scale,calls in the scientific duo from INPIT,or the Inter-Nations Phenomena Investigations Team.We know their credentials because of the logo on their camper,and their outta sight matching orange jumpsuits.Inexplicably we get no less than ten minutes of the sheriff grooving along to a group of young hippies playing folky guitar songs about Jesus,before he locks them all up in jail with no warning.ZaAt discovers he only has a plastic eye for the female INPIT team member,injecting her with the compound,but she is rescued before she can be lowered into the giant fry daddy,her male partners and the sheriff getting catfish scratch fever in the process.ZaAt makes for the ocean,cannisters of his formula in tow,and his would-be she-guppy follows behind in a trance-like state.I'd imagine I looked the same way when this movie finally ended,but for entirely different reasons.

"What??ACTING serum??!!Noooooooo!!!"
Appropriately,nobody involved here really ever did anything else involving movies(the sheriff was an extra in blaxploitation classic J.D.'s Revenge the next year,I'm one step ahead of you,Anon!),proving once again that the Gods occasionally smile down upon us.Also released as "Bloodwaters of Dr. Z" and "Hydra",this is one that has to be seen to be believed.If hokey,low-budget monster movies are your bag,then this is a Prada.ZaAt submerges itself in a pond,where air bubbles and one bw rise from every seam in its rubber suit.

Unbelievably,the makers of "Zaat" used no CGI whatsoever for their realistic creature effects.

"Death Bed:The Bed That Eats"(1977)d/George Barry

Gotta hand it to George Barry.See, I'll get a ridiculous idea in my head, maybe share it with some friends so they can laugh about it, and maybe it's funny the next day too, if we're lucky.This guy spends five years and thirty grand producing a low budget movie in Michigan, based on an outrageous nightmare he had, it never sees the light of day, until someone bootlegs it from the video master in the eighties,and now over thirty years later, I can sit down in the luxury of Castle Wop and ridicule it for myself.I've had some pretty fucking stupid independent film ideas over the years; mystical viking statuettes that make people fight to the death over them, killer aborted foetuses screaming for vengeance with fleshy meathooks for hands...the list is long and embarrassing.One thing I can say,is that I've never set out to make a film about a bed that eats people.
You know,it's almost a good idea,as a five or ten minute vignette in an anthology.As it stands though,a 77 minute poorly-executed exercise in surreal absurdity, it rates right up there with The Chooper, Blood Feast,Truth or Dare,and Hydra as one of those z-grade trash heaps that you laugh your way through,more stupid for it, but glad you did,so you can relate the ordeal to everyone you know,wearing it like a medal of dishonor.As rotten as this is,you're gonna wanna see it for yourself.

"There it is!" "Where? Behind the bed?" "No,you fool! It is the bed!"
A groovy couple are out on the standard date;breaking into an abandoned mansion,with a packed lunch consisting of a few apples,a bucket of fried chicken,and a bottle of wine.Must be their anniversary or something.Problem is, the ornate antique bed they're making out on is possessed by a demon who enjoys eating people.See, somewhere in the mattress is its stomach,which looks like a tank of yellow bicarbonate of soda,and when the bed gets hungry,the mattress spouts soap suds that envelop its meal-to-be,before the hapless victim falls into the yellow liquid and is digested.Behind a painting(translation:ink drawing) on the wall,a dead ringer for Cure frontman Robert Smith,complete with makeup,poofy shirt,and painted nails,is trapped for all time,sounding like a grown up Stewie Griffin providing color commentary into a microphone that's heavy on reverb.The demon himself does a lot of snoring and chewing into the same microphone,too.Only nobody can hear them but the viewer,apparently.There's a lot of painfully unfunny backstory of the bed's historical meals,only everyone it eats pretty much wears the indelible fashion stamp of the 1970s,no matter what era the meal is supposed to be from.So this ravenous bed has been swallowing sorry sons o' bitches for years,until when no one was braindead enough to lie on it,the mansion was finally abandoned.Enter these three wallflower chicks driving to the mansion's remains,two frumpy white girls,one dumpy soul sister,for whatever reason.They've packed a lunch of pickles and a bottle of wine.A film full of gourmets,this is.

Where y'alls be goin at,baybuh! The bed scores itself some soul food.
The bed eats one of the girls when she lies down for a nap,scoring itself some Pepto Bismol(!)out of her hand bag afterwards when it gets indigestion(!!).Next it begins eating the soul sister,who wakes up mid-meal and tries to escape,only to get lassoed by phantom bedsheets(!!!)and pulled back to the bed.The third girl,who we find out the bed is "afraid of" thanks to the chatty poltergeist behind the painting,is pushed to the brink of insanity after seeing the bed chow down on her nubian girlfriend.Her brother shows up on the scene,and tries to stab his way into the bed's stomach with a knife to go in and rescue the black girl,but the bed digests his hands(!),leaving him with two skeletal mitts at the end of his bloody wrists.Other than that,though,he's okay(!!).He tells his sibling to break the hands off(!!!),which she does.When the bed falls asleep,the spirit announces he can tell the girl how to destroy the bed once and for all(the bed only sleeps and eats,you couldn't have ever pulled this off before?),through some hokey figure eights carved on the floor and in the nearby field,and a pointless magic ritual,after which the girl dies,and the first owner of the bed arises from the dead(funny,she's pretty seventies-tastic,too),and teleports the infernal thing to the field,where the bed catches fire(translation: someone can pour gasoline all over it,and not burn down the historic estate in the process),the spirit behind the drawing dies with the demon,and is released from his worldly prison,leaving the viewer scratching his head.What just happened in the last seventy-seven minutes exactly?We may never know for sure.

Even a demonic, people-eating bed turns to Pepto Bismol when faced with uncomfortable indigestion.
If this sounds like an insane viewing experience,that's because it is.There are some mind-blowingly bizarre scenarios played out in front of the camera, somewhat straight-facedly at that.There are moments you'll be convinved that your glassies have just lied to you about, and some where you're laughing so hard you may need to stock up on adult disposable diapers beforehand to safeguard against leakage over.And it's thankfully got a relatively short running time.On the other hand,this is not a good movie,and it's arguably not even a bad movie.The actors are wooden and clunky when they're allowed to deliver lines directly(most of the time they speak into that aforementioned microphone introspectively,harder to flub lines that way,ya know),no one is attractive enough to focus upon long enough to care about,the entire mess is horribly dated,though the eating effects left me chuckling on more than one occasion.Watch it once,as I'll turn the bedspread just once on the rating scale for this lost oddity this time around...

You fucked with the Death Bed, and ended up with skeleton hands, bitch.

Nightbeast(1982)d/Don Dohler

In essence,a remake of Baltimore byproduct Dohler's earlier(even cheaper!)film,The Alien Factor,Nightbeast packs an amateur punch like no other rubbery-alien-in-silver-disco-suit-with-prop-laser-pistol-rampages-through-backyards-in-Maryland production ever has or probably ever will.There's a little something for everyone here.Cheap gore slathered over fried egg eighties boobs with a side order of uncomfortably staged love scenes and piss-poor optical laser effects.What makes amateur filmmakers tackle ambitious sci-fi/horror projects,when they know their production values will hinder them from making anything close to what they were shooting for in the first place is beyond me.But I sincerely hope they NEVER stop trying,as laughs(even unintentional ones) are so hard to come by these days.

From the dark recesses of outer space it came,to play with your entrails.
A homicidal alien life form,decked out in silver lame' and bent on total destruction of mankind crashes his interplanetary vessel...in Maryland.Poor otherworldly bastard.Some local hunters see the ship plummetting out of the night sky,and converge on the site to investigate further,only to be dispatched by a small laser gun that envelops its target in red light before incinerating it into a pile of smouldering ashes.Once the local population has an idea of what it's up against,Sheriff Cinder is called on to defend the townspeople,with the help of Deputy Lisa,a girl who likes her men like she likes her omelettes:flabby,no acting ability,and a perm.The flabby,perm-coiffed sheriff woodenly deducts(I smell an uncomfortable,uninspired sex scene in the works) that their first course of action would logically be to call in a geryatric marksman to shoot the laser pistol out of the beast's hand(!).Though many good extras get vaporized in the battle,the old geezer manages to blast the bastard's blaster,forcing the alien to tear his victims apart with his bare hands now,instead.The residents of Perry Hill,MD are in the middle of a low tech nightmare,that they can't awaken from...

Consider yourself laserized...hardcore,you goofy motherfucker!
Cinder visits Bert,the mayor(!),in an effort to convince the politician to evacuate the town until the intergalactic fiend has been subdued.Bert isn't buying,since he's got a highly important pool party coming up that afternoon,and he wants to impress the governor.Cinder evacuates the town without Bert's authorization anyway,rendering the whole previous scene worthless unless you enjoy watching non-actors channelling scenes from Jaws.During a run-in with the Nightbeast,the sheriff injures his leg,and when he and Lisa escape to her place,she dresses and treats his wound,and strips to a towel in front of him.After she takes a shower,he awkwardly seduces her("Can I get this shirt off?""Yes.Can I get this towel off?")and a bizzarely disturbing love scene ensues.The beast kills more people,and the sheriff and his posse manage to electrocute it in a moment of DIY brilliance,but seeing the permed and pale lawman and his tanned deputy roll in the sheets proves to be the one horrifying moment that stays with me long after the end credits roll.Lisa,I'll be taking a shower if you're done in there.Can I get this shirt off,baby?

Galactic Baby Huey in a silver disco suit?Damned skippy.
This was one of my first rentals at General Radio in Wilkes-Barre,Pa,once I'd gotten a free membership card after buying my Sony Betamovie camcorder and betamax vcr there.Watching it now takes me right back to that summer where me and my buddies crowded around the big woodgrain floor model television in the parlour every night,a different pair of horror flicks to screen every time.Dohler immortalized himself in our eyes through efforts like this,every bit as entertaining as Plan 9 from Outer Space in the same unfortunate way.You won't regret giving this a look,but from a technical standpoint,anything more than one wop would be misleading,which I give it,proudly:

Makeshift MacGuyvers from Maryland take out the titular troublemaker with household ingenuity.