Tom Weaver was feeling generous when he made his list but I actually agree with him for the most part. Doc Savage: Man of Bronze was a great disappointment. It's also backwards in that the best part is the opening 30 minutes and it goes to hell in the jungle portion. The Art Deco stuff in the beginning still looks cool. I suspect Pal had to do it for 10¢ like he did most of his films.
 
tom thumb looks quite nice in the theater (astounding matte paintings) and the huge amounts of Tom Howard traveling matte work and the Puppetoon sequences make it feel lavish when it wasn't. Also ace comics Terry Thomas and Peter Sellars (10 seconds before he lost a ton of weight and became a huge star) are a delight. It is, alas, too much of a pure kiddie film for and adult to sit through it more than once or twice.

The Conquest of Space is a very bad film …  such a train wreck … I should hate it but it has such a marvelous, undiluted, 1950s sci-fi vibe that I can watch it a lot.  Bill Warren is rather critical of the effects work — mind you the flaws are many — but damn it looks so cool!

The Power is a mixed bag. I rather like it but it was on the shelf for a couple of years too long. Had it been released earlier it might have done some business. As you can see in the post below the well-informed Tom Weaver sets me right. The Power did not sit on the shelf … it was, however, a bit late in the game to fit into the whole 60s paranoia cycle. I still like a lot of it.


Atlantis: The Lost Continent is a bad film. I was — like most kids my age at that time — watching a lot of Hercules flicks (peplum — as the French critics called 'em ) and most of them were deadly dull to say the least.  When Pal did Atlantis: The Lost Continentit was if a conventional peplum was suddenly shot full of fun! It was also obviously done for little money (third-string actors combined with left over set elements, standing back lot sets, old props, and costumes pulled from MGM's warehouse and a s**tload of shots from the super production Quo Vadis?) except for the really cool submarine shots and the sinking of Atlantis done by A. Arnold Gillespie's crew where they spent a buck or two. 
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_9ppk5WpjmTc/TF1NkLwU-yI/AAAAAAAAEFk/vucDbdFK3DY/s1600/a3.jpg    qv+-+burning1.jpg  http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/images/reviews/190/1285966409_5.jpg
My son  this comes from the movie The Prodigal, those scenes from Quo Vadis? but the last was done for this movie.

opticalguy1954@yahoo.com (Spencer Gill)
Last Edited By: opticalguy Jun 7 13 10:03 AM. Edited 2 times.