Chapter 16
Prolific low-budget filmmaker Robert L. Lippert struck a lucrative deal with 20th Century Fox in 1956 to finance and distribute his cheapo productions under the nomenclature of Regal Films. The movies would be shot using anamorphic lenses but marketed as RegalScope, Fox insisting that the company’s flagship CinemaScope process be reserved solely for its own big-budget motion pictures. Between 1956 and 1966, Lippert produced 180 features under the Regal Films banner, mostly crime thrillers and Westerns, with a smattering of horror. Most were highly profitable for both Lippert and Fox. Only five horror/sci-fi movies were made by Regal in the 1950s: She Devil (completed 1956, released 1957), Back from the Dead (1957), Kronos (1957), The Unknown Terror (1957) and Space Master X-7 (1958).
It should be noted that Hammer’s The Abominable Snowman (1957) and Triad’s The Flesh and the Fiends (1959), although respectively issued in RegalScope and DyaliScope, were not Regal Films productions. The Abominable Snowman was distributed through 20th Century Fox via Lippert, filmed in widescreen and released under Lippert’s exclusive brand name based on the CinemaScope process; the movie’s credentials could equally have been termed “in MegaScope” or even “in HammerScope” (both formats were employed in future Hammer features), and Lippert’s association with Hammer (commencing in 1950; see chapter 25) was brief anyway. In The Flesh and the Fiends, DyaliScope was the promotional idiom used (as it was with many continental widescreen productions.)
The five true Regal Films formed part of the staple diet of many a fantasy fanatic, a mixed bag drawing in the crowds on Sunday afternoons, year in, year out, not for their content which, apart from Kronos, was ordinary to say the least, but because of their one saving grace; they were shown in widescreen. In the late ’50s/early ’60s, widescreen horror films that appeared in massive cinemas on larger-than-normal screens were a big draw for young fans who were probably bamboozled into thinking that what they were watching was somehow superior to standard screen aspect. It mattered not that The Unknown Terror was patently lacking in any kind of terror — it was up there on that all-enveloping screen, enabling audiences to participate in the action more so than standard format ever did (theaters were more cavernous in construction than those of today, built to hold audiences of up to 2,000, being perfectly adapted for projecting films in varied permutations of ’Scope). So those fungoid natives looked doubly scary, but not scary enough to warrant an “Adults Only” certificate; in the United Kingdom, Back from the Dead was the only X-rated flick among the five; the others were “A” classified.
The four “A” certificate Regal productions, when not presented as second features with more prestigious outings, were frequently screened as double bills, allowing under- 14s (if accompanied by an adult) to have their first taste of lukewarm horror before they were old enough (16) to experience the real thing. Back from the Dead often went the rounds with assorted crime thrillers. In hindsight, they weren’t all that bad; a lot worse existed out there on the circuits at the time. Let’s take a look at Lippert’s run-of-the-mill programmers and decide whether or not we wasted money on our tickets all those years ago when getting in to see Space Master X-7 c/w The Unknown Terror. In actual fact, do the Regal horrors in “stunning RegalScope” contain points of interest that have been scoffed at or ignored in the past?
Kurt Neumann, the man behind Rocketship X-M, directed the first of Regal’s widescreen horror/ fantasy efforts, She Devil, a Jekyll and Hyde–type melodrama of reasonable interest. Biochemist Jack Kelly and benefactor Albert Dekker invent a serum distilled from an extract of fruit flies. This, they reason, will cause wounds and ailments to heal themselves, much in the same way lizards are able to grow new tails after an injury. Requiring a human guinea pig on which to experiment, they inject tuberculosis sufferer Mari Blanchard with the potion. She recovers from the disease, but the cure has an unforeseen side-effect: Blanchard has undergone a drastic personality change; like a chameleon, she is able to will herself, in times of emotional stress, to transmute from a pleasant brunette into a manipulative, homicidal blonde predator. Kelly, who has an almighty crush on the femme fatale, turns a blind eye as Blanchard struts her stuff, thieving and flirting without so much as a single qualm. Things go from bad to worse when Blanchard meets filthy rich John Archer at a party. Hungry to lay her hands on his wealth, she strangles Archer’s wife, marries the playboy and kills him in a car crash, emerging unscathed from the wreckage to claim her inheritance. Horrified at what they have created, Kelly and Dekker render Blanchard unconscious by pumping carbon dioxide into her bedroom, and they administer an antidote. The experimental serum is driven from her body, allowing the tuberculosis to return; in the final frame, Blanchard, in her brunette form, expires.
As an exercise in dual personality, a much-favored ’50s theme, She Devil just about pulled it off, flawed by a hasty conclusion, Blanchard’s clumsy handling of her twin roles and the too half-hearted Kelly, as the leading man. Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter’s score turned from menacing to smoochy whenever Blanchard in her Marilyn Monroe guise appeared, while Neumann would do far better with his second Regal movie, Kronos. Neumann and Carroll Young’s script, though, sparkles with laconic exchanges to satisfy all dialogue lovers, mostly at Blanchard’s expense:
Blanchard to Kelly and Dekker: “You created me and I’m your responsibility!”
Archer, seeing blonde Blanchard for the first time: “That is the most beautiful test tube I have ever seen.”
Blanchard to her creators: “I’m immune to everything, afraid of nothing!”
Blanchard to lustful Archer: “Haven’t you guessed? Dr. Bach and Dr. Scott simply materialized me out of a test tube.”
Archer: “Of course, I should have known that anybody as lovely as you couldn’t possibly be human.”
Dekker to Kelly: “Did we create an inhuman being?”
And lastly, Dekker voices to Kelly what horror cinema addicts have known for decades: “You wouldn’t be the first man to fall in love with his own creation.”
Director of low-budget Westerns, Charles Marquis Warren had a stab at the supernatural genre with Back from the Dead, turning Catherine Turney’s novel of reincarnation, The Other One (Turney wrote the script), into a jumbled occult potboiler. Pregnant Peggie Castle visits the house her husband Arthur Franz shared with his first wife, who disappeared in mysterious circumstances six years back. Repeated shots of crashing waves, a ghostly voice chanting, “You can’t get away from me” and Raoul Kraushaar’s noisy, wailing soundtrack doesn’t bode well for Castle; she suffers convulsions, loses her baby and is instantly possessed by the spirit of the long-dead woman, a devious seductress who sets out to cause trouble for everyone around her. If given the big-screen treatment, Back from the Dead could have been an absolute cracker on the heavily explored theme of dual identity, but Warren was obviously shackled by budget restraints and couldn’t produce the goods to give the material the consideration it deserved. His inconsistent direction, coupled with too much dark photography, muddies the waters, the end result a turgid mess. Tied up in the confused plot is a black magic cult led by evil priest Otto Reichow; after what seems like hours showing the cast scampering from one house to another, Castle causing all kinds of mischief, the movie climaxes with a sacrificial ceremony in which Reichow attempts to drain the blood from Evelyn Scott, but for what purpose is never made clear.
Apart from Castle, Franz and Reichow, there’s a lot of peripheral characters in the picture (Castle’s sister; Franz’s ex-in-laws; Franz’s buddy and Reichow’s female acolyte), perhaps one too many, a sign of over-ambition. The outcome is a frantic, dialogue-driven timetable of random occurrences, Warren relying a great deal on Castle’s agitated and scheming possessed wife to satisfactorily carry the storyline. To her credit, the actress does surprisingly well (beating by a whisker Mari Blanchard’s similar stint in She Devil); however, even at 79 minutes, the film, despite a couple of eerie moments, seems twice as long and is marred by that appalling score. The widescreen format rescues the movie from mediocrity but it sorely needed a surer hand at the helm; nevertheless, Warren was given another shot and was just as shaky in his next picture for Regal — the lackluster The Unknown Terror.
They may have appeared frightening to a generation of eight-year-olds, who first came across them in the hallowed pages of Famous Monster of Filmland, but in reality, on the big screen, those fungus-faced natives in Warren’s second Regal feature weren’t that frightening at all. Tacked onto an adventure-type scenario is a mild horror yarn concerning mad biologist Gerald Milton. Holed up on a Caribbean island, he’s nurturing a fast-growing hallucinogenic fungus in the legendary Cave of the Dead where human sacrifices were once carried out. Local natives, due to be sacrificed to their gods, are used by Milton in his experiments with the fungus, turning them into mutants who inhabit the cave. John Howard, wife Mala Powers and crippled Paul Richards (he’s in love with Powers; she was his sweetheart before Howard moved in) arrive on the island in search of Powers’ brother; the scientist was searching for the cave and disappeared. The trio become embroiled with Milton and his native wife May Wynn, spending the last half of the picture inside the cave, warding off the mutant natives, the dripping fungus and crazy Milton. Wynn finally seals the cave entrance with explosives, Milton is killed in the blast, Howard dies after falling on rocks and Powers and Richards swim to safety, emerging from the sea in each other’s arms.
The Unknown Terror is flatfooted and unconvincing; the oozing fungus resembles soapsuds cascading down the cave walls (and rumor has it that it was!), the fungoid natives might scare the pants off the nippers (and did, many moons ago!) while the B regulars go through the motions proficiently enough without stretching themselves. Warren slackly directs, resulting in a lack of suspense, surprises and shocks (he returned to television on completion of this movie). This program filler served its usefulness, introducing youngsters to the world of horror, however diluted that horror was.
One of the most bizarre spectacles in American sci-fi ’50s cinema was the sight of 100-foot-tall Kronos (“A Metallic Vampire Stalking the Earth!” screamed the trailers) pulverizing its way across the Mexican countryside, thousands fleeing in its wake. Like a colossal hydraulic press with pistons as legs, this giant robot from another world had an electronic vocabulary all of its own; it beeped, it buzzed, it thrummed and it whirred as waves of pulsating light transmitted on electrical bolts radiated from its domed head. Yes, Kronos remains Regal’s most celebrated fantasy achievement, a one-off event in terms of limited B-movie resources (the budget ran to $160,000) not preventing director Kurt Neumann and his crew of technicians from coming up with an absolute belter (Neumann made Kronos back-to-back with She Devil.)
Deposited on a Mexican beach by a flying saucer (termed Asteroid M47 by scientist Jeff Morrow), the robot’s task is to suck up energy from Earth’s power plants, an “accumulator” of sorts, and transport it to a dying planet where it will be converted into matter. Morrow, having to constantly defend himself from the advances of frisky Barbara Lawrence (sex in the lab seems to be the sole thing on her mind!), warns the military not to nuke the robot, but to no avail; a plane carrying the H-bomb crashes into Kronos, which feeds off the resulting explosion and increases in size. As the robot steamrollers its way toward a Los Angeles nuclear facility, frantic Morrow also has another problem to contend with, colleague John Emery. The alien force controlling the robot soon possesses Emery and he’s giving information by telepathy to Kronos detailing the sites of key power installations. After Emery destroys himself in remorse at his actions, Morrow hits upon the idea of lowering a negative-charged bolt between Kronos’ antennae to reverse polarity. Aparachute drops the bolt successfully, Kronos absorbs its own incredible electrical force, implodes violently and ends up a pile of twisted metal.
Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter’s pounding music underlined the ingenious special effects (Jack Rabin and Irving Block) in a unique sci-fi offering, and if audiences think they’ve come across this soundtrack before, they’d be right; it was honed to perfection, speeded up and used to great effect in It! The Terror from Beyond Space. We have to wait a full frustrating half-an-hour for Kronos to appear, standing sentinel on a beach like a towering metal monolith, and Neumann’s direction in that opening segment is pedestrian in places. But when the robot begins its rampage across fields and rocky terrain, the pace steps up a gear and never lets up. Neumann, aided and abetted by Karl Struss’ crystal-clear widescreen photography, delivers some spellbinding scenes of mass destruction in a picture that is as good as the much-maligned B-movie can get. Regal, in the sphere of science fiction, would do no better, not in the ’50s or the 1960s; Kronos is a minor classic of its type, triumphing over budgetary odds, never to be repeated. The final entrant in Regal’s mélange of ’50s fantasy efforts was the disappointing Space Master X-7. A space probe returns to Earth covered in alien fungus spores, termed “Blood Rust” by Doctor Paul Frees. A sample is taken to Frees’ laboratory where the spores multiply at an alarming rate. Following a tussle with his mistress (Lyn Thomas) over the whereabouts of their son (he’s in Hawaii), Frees is hit on the head, dripping blood over the fungus that quickly devours the doctor and spreads throughout the house. Bill Williams turns up from the space agency, fries the organism to death and, at that point, director Edward Bernds’ Quatermass-type facsimile quite literally loses the plot.
Yes, after an encouraging opening 20 minutes, Space Master X-7 goes off the boil, the producers having run out of ideas on where to go with the story. What makes up the remainder of the running time (50 minutes) is a protracted police hunt for Thomas, carrying the lethal spores on her body and in danger of contaminating the whole of America. Williams and the cops must prevent her from going to Honolulu at all costs, so Bernds pads out the action to interminable lengths and shoots in semi-documentary style in a futile attempt to generate some excitement. Thomas evades her pursuers by altering her looks and boards a flight to Hawaii, agent Robert Ellis on her tail. The director doesn’t even finish his effort with a sucker-punch; turning back to the States, the plane belly flops on the Santa Barbara airstrip after the rubbery killer fungus has caused a spot of bother in the baggage hold. The passengers disembark to a de-contamination center (including Thomas) and that’s it.
It goes without saying that if in normal screen size, this movie would have sunk without trace a long time ago. RegalScope presents the action in a more favorable light but Space Master X-7 is an exceedingly dull sci-fi picture, in fact the weakest out of the five ’50s Regal productions. It was fairly successful on the Sunday horror circuits solely because, paired with The Unknown Terror, younger buffs could experience two widescreen sci-fi/horror flicks in one sitting, a veritable luxury at the time. Which is why, as stated, these five pictures went the rounds year after year. Never was presentation over content truer than in Regal’s run of oddball fantasy features that consistently pulled in the crowds, no matter how lame (Kronos excepting) they indeed were.