Halloween Suggetions ‘10 Part I
As a change of pace this year instead of listing serials that would make good Halloween viewing, I decided to high light a monster movie each week that might appeal to the serial fan. For my first selection I thought I would suggest the monster rally to end all monster rallies, Assignment Terror. An early Paul Naschy vehicle that throws in everything but the kitchen sink, not even House of Dracula had this many monsters in one film.
The plot follows a group of aliens who want to take over the world, they could just blow it up with our own nuclear weapons, but they want to perserve the natural resources for their own uses. Reanimating a couple of dead scientists to house their alien consciousness (one of whom is Michael Rennie in his last screen role), they decide to kidnap a bunch of attractive women and then bring our legendary monsters back to life and see what it is about them that scares us, duplicate the effect and take over the world. So in short order they locate and pull the stake out of Count Drac….er Count de Meirhoff, remove the silver bullets from Larry Tal…er Waldemar Danisky, dig up Im Ho T…..er Pha Ho Tep, and unearthed the Franken….er the Feranksollen Monster.
Things don’t work out for the aliens, none of the monsters seem too keen on the idea of being used for world conquest. Meirhoff converts one of the captive women into a vampire and takes her back to his coffin to plan his own take over, Danisky and another captive fall in love. The plan to use Danisky’s werewolf alter ego to defeat the aliens, after which she will kill Danisky and free him from his curse as only true love can. To make matters worse there is an international agent getting close as he investigates the strange string of murders that have accompanied every monster acquisition, and the reanimated bodies the aliens are using are starting to reassert their human emotions on the alien consciousness.
The whole thing ends with the slobber knocker to end all slobber knockers as Danisky’s werewolf takes on the other three monsters in a monster a monster showdown, the aliens get gunned down by the agent and his colleagues and then the whole place blows up.
A crazy movie that makes little sense, and top heavy with too many characters, with too low a budget for what they were attempting to do, but it is fun and the final twenty minutes is non stop action.
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