Sci-Fi Classics
The Wasp Woman, The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, The Killer Shrews, First Spaceship on Venus, The Giant Gila Monster(Diamond Entertainment Corp., 1996, VHS: $19.99)
When I was your age, we had to walk 56 miles through sheer frozen white-outs, uphill, wearing all white, through traffic, on our knees, just to get to Hickory Farms to buy a cheese log for Uncle Sue, who we all knew hated the damn things and always ended up recycling them come next Halloween. Not anymore, though. These days you can get all the cheese you’d ever want or need from the fine folks at Diamond Entertainment, who’ve cleverly (and cost-effectively) repackaged — and in some cases re-edited — five Sixties sci-fi “classics.” Roger Corman’s 1960 The Wasp Woman, Joe Green’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1963), Ray Kellogg’s The Killer Shrews (1959), Kurt Maetzig’s First Spaceship on Venus (1960), and Kellogg’s The Giant Gila Monster (1959). A couple of these have turned up on Mystery Science Theater 3000 over the years, so that should give you some indication of the production levels we’re dealing with here, but for the micro-budgeted, this can’t be beat. Corman’s offering fares the best out of the five. Susan Cabot enjoys the rewards of royal jelly on her egocentric veneer and goes all spikey-tailed. Also smooth are Kellogg’s two giant beastie offerings — the Mexico-lensed Gila Monster deserves attention for, well, the giant gila monster, while Shrews is a perennial fave from my formative years, which, frankly, should explain a lot. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die ought to be retitled The Film That Wouldn’t End, even in the severely truncated edit seen here, and First Spaceship on Venus explains once and for all why no one at NASA is planning any Venusian probes any time soon. There’s nothing like a good wallop of bad acting and sub-par Sixties-era effects work to offset the giddy hollerings of old George Bailey, and at less than the cost of some decent brie, you can’t go wrong.
This article appears in December 10 • 1999.