reddog122 wrote:
Always good to read a MOVIE NIGHTS review Ryan. Are the MONSTER KIDS meetings still ongoing?  I remember a few post back you wrote Arch was going to start writing about them again at MISCELLANEOUS MONSTERS.


Kezilla is supposed to start it back up anytime now. Here's a taste of one of the Monster Kid meeting posts:

It was a double birthday as we celebrated the special day of FXRH and RyanBrennan, both born on June 17 a year apart. FXRH bought everyone their choice of goodies from the dollar menu at Jack-in-the-Box (tacos, bacon cheeseburgers, Breakfast Jacks) or Beef ‘n Cheddars (luckily on sale two for $4) from Arby’s.  I baked a devil’s food cake with cream cheese icing (all pre-packaged ingredients), which is just about the best cake you can make for the price. Count Gamula supplied a half gallon of Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream.

First up was EL FANTASMA DE LA OPERETA (1955), which we all thought was a Mexican film, but turns out was made in Argentina. It had no subtitles so we had to guess as to what was going on. Here’s what we determined: a group of performers is warned not to do a show at a theater because it is haunted by a phantom. A mad scientist who has collected the world’s most famous monsters (Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Invisible Man, and, of course, the Frankenstein monster) also shows up to try to stop them from performing, which is something we couldn’t quite figure out. At various times throughout, song and dance numbers are rammed down our throats.

Of course, it was the monsters we were interested in – that’s why we call them “Monster Kid meetings.”

Only the Frankenstein monster was patterned after the Universal design, with a flat top and bolts in his neck – and he takes Boris Karloff’s jerky arm movements to an absurd level when he tries (and continually fails) to grab someone. He’s also pretty short for a Frankenstein monster.

I suppose that a point could be made that the movie’s Dracula is a little like John Carradine since he wears a high top hat. But he also wears a monocle (is that a Dracula “first”?) and is about as threatening as some society fancy boy. No fangs, of course.

The Wolf Man is the oddest of the bunch – he’s short and fat and extremely ineffectual, so perhaps the filmmakers were thinking that Lou Costello was bitten by Lon Chaney Jr. somewhere in ABBOT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN and decided that this was what he’d be like. I think they were pretty close.

Oops, I forgot. The Invisible Man does look exactly like the Universal version, since he’s invisible the entire time. And I do mean invisible. For his introduction, there’s a hat hanging on a wire (and just why would he be wearing a hat and nothing else?). In another scene, a door opens; and in another, a bad double exposure has him drink some coffee. That’s it for invisible man effects. Seriously.

I should have realized this wasn’t a real 1950s' Mexican movie for several reasons. First, the sex seemed to be much more overt, what with the group leader’s wife getting annoyed that he won’t make love to her right at the beginning of the movie (they had twin beds, of course – the movie didn’t go that far). And there are two obviously gay characters. But the big giveaway that it wasn’t a Mexican movie was that it had at least two special visual effects – one of them was actually stop motion! (For those who must know, about ten minutes into the film a poster advertising the entertainers bursts open via stop motion.) I’ve seen a bunch of 1950s Mexican movies and have yet to find a single optical effect, not even a wipe between scenes. Hell, I’m not sure I’ve seen a simple dissolve.

We had a great time with this and it was very much an MST3K kind of romp. We were even seeing lots of resemblances to other famous people – I thought the female lead was a dead ringer for Rosemary DeCamp (from the LOVE THAT BOB show) and in one scene there was a portrait of someone who looked just like Forrest J Ackerman! I’m not kidding.

Sadly, I can’t really recommend the movie to anyone who’s not interested in Mexican movies or Universal monster rip-offs. But we loved it.