The story in The Lost Jungle isn't very strange but then I am used to the lies from these multi-movie pack people. Clyde Beatty chases after his girlfriend who is ship wrecked on an island somewhere. It's a chopped up serial from 1934, cut down to 68 minutes, much of which is Clyde and his animal acts. Clyde's skills come in handy on the island which turns out to be overrun with lions and tigers. Grabbing a handy branch, or a piece of hanging vine Clyde tames whose wild beasts. Once he even stares a tiger to the ground. As Napoleon would agree, skills are good things to have. The story is a pretty standard jungle serial. It was most interesting to me to see Clyde Beatty. He's a figure I had heard of as a child but I don't recall ever seeing any of these movies or serials on tv. I could easily have, much of everything I have ever seen is lost in that jungle of a brain I have. It's probably a good thing.
Terror Creatures from the Grave is a 1965 gothic horror story called 5 tombe per un medium in Italy. Here are it's other names. Cemetery of the Living Dead, Cinque tombe per un medium, Coffin of Terror, Five Graves for a Medium, and Tombs of Horror. A lawyer arrives at an estate to find the man he came to see long dead. He falls for a blond woman and some people start dying. There's a family backstory having to do with the plague. There are mummified hands in cases through the house. The print is poorer than most, a very softly defined gray not blank and white. The story is nothing new, not even when it was new. Occasionally interesting but not often enough. The director took his name off of the movie due to his dissatisfaction with it.
Counterblast is a 1948 film originally called Devil's Plot. A Nazi scientist kills an Australian bacteriologist to take his identity. His plan is to make a plague and the antidote for the future Nazi return to power. You know that's going to go wrong. The doctor is tripped up by the arrival of a young woman from the dead mand's past. It's a fairly good movie, with some fair suspense. A better payoff over most of the movies on the disc though the quality of the image is not the best.
This Is Not a Test was pretty good. Several people are thrown together in the desert as the bombs begin to fall at the end of the world. A motorcycle cop stops a bunch of people from going into town and tells them the atom bombs are on the way. There's a hipster and his blond gal, a crabby old man and his teenybopper granddaughter, a unhappy married couple, a hot-headed tough trucker, a criminal and a few others. Things go wrong pretty quickly in this 73 minute movie. There's even puppy killin' after the cop starts to go squirrelly. Since there isn't much time, the movie seems to only cover a couple of hours, people deteriorate very rapidly. Some tough guys show up, running away from town where law and order had failed almost immediately. This movie might have been harder to believe in 1962 but after Katrina last year I bet a couple of hours isn't too much time any more. People do move much faster here in the future of 1962. They should slow the fuck down.
War of the Monsters is a retitled Daikaijû kessen: Gamera tai Barugon, or Gamera vs. Barugon. This is the 88 minute US tv version of the original 106 minute version. Gamera fights Barugon. It was an MST3K choice. I've seen it alot.
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