Science Fiction Double Feature

This double feature is courtesy of the Midnite Movies People.
Phantom is from 1955 and Beast is from 1958.
Both clock in under 80 minutes.
Yay for short attention span friendly fare!




Pay attention to the pretty posters....because unfortunately they're the best thing about both of these movies.

Phantom: I tried hard with this movie, believe me, I did. I even started it over twice.
But I just couldn't get into it. At first I thought it was going to be kick ass when I saw this in the first five minutes.



Yippee! Underwater rubber monster suits - and in the first five minutes! But unfortuntately the rest of the film doesn't hold up to the cheesiness. There's a scientist, and his daughter, and a cop, and radioactive material in the ocean, that the scientist somehow made the monster to protect. As you can imagine, that plan does't work so well. It all ends with dynamite and a big boom and that's that.

Beast: Again, not the best film - but definitely more interesting than Phantom. For one thing, the characters and their relationships are definitely unusual for the time. We have mom, dad, and their teenage daughter living on a failing farm. Dad feels like a fuck up and is sure that wifey agrees; Mom is a real biotch and even admits she's 'not easy to live with' and takes her frustrations out on the hired mute help. Daughter just wants everyone to be happy and doesn't understand why they're not. Oh and it's her bday.

We have some weird air disturbance, which everyone thinks is a low flying plane that went over emitting a terrible noise, and first animals and then people start acting homicidal. Turns out it's not a plane but this dude, who comes off in the movie like he's about six inches tall.

Sorry for the bad capture - every scene of the alien is superimposed by a big dumb eye.

And how do the one million eyes come into play? Because in the beginning of the film the alien does a menacing voice over letting us know he will be keeping an eye on every move we make....thus the one million eyes bit. Because i guess we'll feel like he has a million eyes. Ooookay. Based on the easy way the family dispose of him in the end, a million eyes is not such a big deal after all.

So not scared,
Mother Firefly