A couple of weeks or so ago I came home from work and Turner Classic Movies was showing a plethora of horror movies. It was the friday before Halloween. It made sense. I was scrambling to record what I hadn't seen before. I sometimes feel I need a second dvdr recorder. Anyway, I'm home, and I turn on TCM and they were running our first selection tonight. I saw the last 15 minutes or so of King of the Zombies before Revenge of the Zombies played. The second movie is sort of a rewrite of the first. It was fun but I wanted to see King of the Zombies. It sounded funner. Come this friday Joe shows up with one of those 9 movie boxes with 13 hours of movies. It has 9 movies but I didn't add up the times of the movies to see if they really had gotten 13 hours on there. For some reason I feel it's a lie. I guess it's being lied to so often, makes a man skeptical. I couldn't find a copy of the box cover online but I didn't look that hard.
It turned out that one of the 9 movies was King of the Zombies, that 1941 classic starring Mantan Moreland. He might only get third billing but he steals the show. And gets all the best lines. That's him, in the hat, in a screen capture from one of the Charlie Chan movies. He's got over 120 movies on his IMDb page, most of which were done from 1933 to 1949. He was in 19 movies the year that KotZ came out. In the opening scene two white guys and Mantan are flying somewhere. The plane crashes on a small island where they meet a strange doctor and the rather odd characters who live in his house. Someone steals their radio during the first night and Mantan runs into the zombies. No one believes him. He gets off a few funny lies and a lot of his bug eyed looks. "Dead folks that's too lazy to lay down." There are some references to enemy spies and the evil doctor has a admiral he's trying to extract the memories from using voodoo and hynotism. There's a lot of running around and zombies. Our hero's win the day and Mantan has the last line: "If there's one thing I don't want to be twice, zombies is both of them." I am betting TCM will run this again, and sooner than next Halloween, so I'll be keeping an eye out.
Our second feature was the 1959 film The Atomic Submarine. Some science guys go in an atomic submarine to the north pole to investigate the disappearance of some ships. There's some interplay amongst the crew and science guys, some of whom have issues. It takes a while but the crew finally come across an alien spaceship hiding out under the ice. This movie was the inpiration for both Irwin Allen's Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea movie and subsequent tv series. There's a guy with some original ideas, too bad he never used them for good. The series even used the alien spaceship plot for an episode. I did like the movie version that preceeded the tv series. I found the series to be pretty poor by the second season. Turner occasinally runs the widescreen version of VTTBOTS, and I am keeping an eye out for that movie too. The dvd we watched of TAS was from The Criterion Collection, so you know they 
think it's good. It looks great, and it's a better than average scientists fighting monsters movie. There are a great gang of character actors going about their business with a bit of stock footage thrown in. Someone's cooking hams or roasts in the galley. You can see a picture of that at the link just above. Later our heroes cook an alien under the ice. And what an alien it is. They poke out his eye, but it grows back. Then they fry his ass. Then we went home and I went to bed.
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