Category Archives: 1960’s

These Are The Damned (1962)

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Once upon a time, mostly before they could get a steady supply of really good blood effects that would wash off of diaphanous nighties, Hammer Films did a lot of business with its Sci-Fi horrors including the renowned Quatermass series and the mostly forgotten X The Unknown and Spaceways. Unfortunately, they didn’t make Village of the Damned, so they released These Are The Damned as frightening children were in at the time. Directed by Joseph Losey, in exile from the USA for being a card-carrying communist, and reasonably based a book by H.L. Lawrence, it was applauded by The Times upon its release and has been recognised as a highpoint of British Sci-Fi cinema.
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The Beach Girls and The Monster (1965)

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There are some films where you just know the producer hammered two random things together in the hopes that the result would be entertaining. Snakes and planes, sharks and tornadoes, Nazis and any excuse to see them brutalised. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes it doesn’t work on a level that just fills you with awe at the majestic beauty of how misshapen and proud the final creation is. There is no way you can convince me that the people behind “Beach Girls And The Monster” knew what they were doing, on any level, as no one could ever intentionally put together such an epic piece of ridiculousness. They just went “people like Beach Girls and Monsters… now go and write that script”.
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Astro Zombies (1968)

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Of the many paths that got me into watching way more dodgy old sci-fi films than is necessarily good for you, a big one was the punk rock band The Misfits. Founded in the late ’70s, and brought up on a steady diet of cheap and cheery shlock from the US TV deregulation and localisations of the late 60’s onward, they were pioneers of the Horror Punk genre. They sang a lot of very fast, very hostile songs that were often odes to the kind of grotty horror their parents had warned them would rot their brains. One of the best tunes (for my money) they ever bashed out was the delightfully nihilistic, anti-social sci-fi murder-cant of “Astro Zombies”. An epic of bile and belligerence, with a singalong section of “Prime directive, exterminate the whole human race”, I had assumed that 1968 film that had inspired it would have been either a marvel of lost outsider art or a delight of bull-dada excess.
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Santa Conquers The Martians (1964)

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This was supposed to be an easy Trash or Treasure to do before the festive season really kicked in. The plan was to find a seasonal movie with a reputation for being a stinker and heap 800 more words of jovial disdain on its head. Could you get any surer shot than a film that’s spent its whole life in the bottom 100 of the Internet Database, has appeared on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and even made the 100 Most Amusingly Bad Movies Ever Made list by the founder of the Razzies? I thought not, and I was wrong. Very happily wrong. And I now know why it shat out money like a gilded Christmas goose when it first hit the cinemas in 1964.
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