Good news for sci-fi fans; Kino’s newly remastered trio of monsterrific thrillers looks great. The favorite Paramount semi-classic The Colossus of New York still impresses with its haunting piano score and solemn direction by Eugène Lourié. The gooey fungus freakout The Unknown Terror is available domestically for the first time in its full ‘Regalscope’ glory. And the latter-day Destination Inner Space is… is… an underwater thriller with an appeal that’s, uh, difficult to put into words. We’ll be polite. Kino’s audio commentators certainly were polite — Steven Bissette, Tim Lucas and Tom Weaver among them.

Sci-Fi Chillers Collection
The Unknown Terror, The Colossus of New York, Destination Inner Space
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1957-1966 / B&W & Color / 2:35 widescreen 1:85 widescreen 1:66 widescreen 1:37 Academy / 230 min. / Street Date May 28, 2024 / available through Kino Lorber / 49.95
Starring: Mala Powers, Otto Kruger, Ross Martin, John Baragrey, Charles Herbert; Gerald Milton, May Wynn, Paul Richards, Robert Hutton, John Howard; Gary Merrill, Sheree North, Scott Brady, Wende Wagner.
Directed by Charles Marquis Warren, Eugène Lourié, Francis D. Lyon

Kino’s Sci-Fi Chillers Collection is a cheeful trio of monster-centric fantasies. The two 1950s entrants work fanciful stories around interesting ideas — fiendish fungus creates an outlandish menace in one show, and the second gives us a superficial look at Sci-fi’s first cinematic cyborg. The third entry is a real joy-killer, a quickie production with nothing on its mind beyond meeting minimum mid- ’60s requirements for a quick sale to TV. Helping quite a bit is Kino’s barrage of expert commentary, both on audio tracks and new ‘sidebar discussion’ videos.

The collection is also an accidental Mala Powers double bill. Who doesn’t like Mala Powers?

The Unknown Terror
1957 / 2:35 widescreen / 77 min. / Beyond Terror
Starring: John Howard, Mala Powers, Paul Richards, May Wynn, Gerald Milton, Duane Gray, Richard Gilden, Martin Garralaga, Sir Lancelot.
Cinematography: Joseph F. Biroc
Production Designer: James W. Sullivan
Film Editor: Michael Luciano
Original Music: Raoul Kraushaar
Written by Kenneth Higgins
Produced by Robert Stabler (Regal Films)
Directed by Charles Marquis Warren

The monster fun begins with a title that back in the ’60s seemingly played on TV midnite shows every week, but that disappeared with the rise of cable TV.  A 2021 Australian disc allowed us to see it in its full ‘scope aspect ratio for the first time, and this 3-film combo is its first domestic presentation. The Unknown Terror belongs to the genre of budget thrillers in which a woman enlists adventurers to hike into a wilderness to rescue a lost husband or brother. At the end of the trail is a fantastic Sci-fi monster, perhaps the lost man himself. Producers liked the format because half the movie can be a safari melodrama. If there are some surprises or neat special effects along the way, all the better.

No annoying teenagers or comic relief comes along for the trip. An explorer has disappeared in South America while looking for a rumored Cave of the Dead. His brother Dan Mathews (John Howard) and wife Gina (Mala Powers) hire expert spelunker Peter Morgan (Paul Richards) to accompany them on the search. They run into superstitious natives and the scientist Ramsey (Gerald Milton), a crackpot who has set up a little kingdom for his secret researches. Wandering in the dark wearing a not-very-Safari-safe nightgown, Gina is confronted by mysterious zombie-like creatures. Ramsey denies the existence of a mystery cave, but the trio presses forward. Only upon entering the cavern do they discover its full secret: Ramsey is working with a weird fungus that turns men into monsters. The explorers must defend themselves against oozing, expanding, lethal fungus slime…. in a cavern with no exit.

Pay close attention to story detail, because most of it is entirely inconsequential!  The motives for the trip are never quite cleared up. Some explorers die and others escape the Goo From Hell. The obnoxious Dr. Ramsey mistreats the natives and his live-in woman, but we never know exactly why he’s growing that malignant goo. Beautiful Mala Powers makes an okay impression, but not so much May Wynn, in a nothing part as ‘Concha.’ In for a forgettable music number is calypso singer Sir Lancelot, whose song isn’t as insightful as the one he sings in a real zombie classic.

The film’s reputation for mediocrity comes from its monster, commonly described as nothing more than soap suds. The finale was a muddle in old flat TV prints, but Blu-ray’s restoration of the original ‘scope framing give it a major boost. In anamorphic Regalscope the cave looks enormous, almost too big to be a stage set. Ace cameraman Joe Biroc lights it well; good editing juggles creepy angles of the slime oozing out of every cave crevice. The film is not all that distinguished, but its technical polish is way above comparable Sci-fi fare like  The Flame Barrier. Biroc would eventually become Robert Aldrich’s go-to cameraman, and Aldrich’s editor Michael Luciano is at work here as well.

We admit it: The Unknown Terror feels special mainly because decent copies have been so scarce over the years. I can remember watching it on TV back in the day, and being convinced something was missing that would explain what was going on. Yes, several thousand Sci-fi and monster fans are going to be curious about this one, even with its deficiencies. I still don’t think Dr. Ramsey’s fungus behaves in any consistent manner.

Is it ‘Regalscope Season?’  We just reviewed The Unknown Terror’s original double-bill exploitation fright-mate, Charles Marquis Warren’s  Back from the Dead. That review explains the somewhat hidden story behind what Regal Films and ‘Regalscope’ were.

The Colossus of New York
1958 / 1:85 widescreen / 70 min.
Starring: John Baragrey, Mala Powers, Otto Kruger, Robert Hutton, Ross Martin, Charles Herbert, Ed Wolff.
Cinematography: John F. Warren
Colossus designed by Charles Gemora, Ralph Jester
Special Photographic Effects: John P. Fulton
Film Editor: Floyd Knudtson
Original Music: Van Cleave
Written by Willis Goldbeck, Thelma Schnee
Produced by William Alland
Directed by Eugène Lourié

Universal’s Sci-fi / horror producer William Alland did a sideways move to Paramount in ’57 -’58, there to produce two teenage dramas directed by Bernard Girard and two science fiction offerings. The more successful of the Sci-fi pics is The Colossus of New York. The talented director Eugène Lourié imparts a graphic fairytale simplicity to its fairly innovative monster, an eight-foot predecessor to the Sci-fi masterpiece RoboCop made thirty years later. A subdued pacifist message offers scares that won’t traumatize children. A main player is a kid, perhaps to appeal to the genre’s presumed audience.

Nobel Peace Prizewinning scientist Jeremy Spensser (Ross Martin) is killed in a traffic accident. His surgeon father William (Otto Kruger) can’t save him, so he does the next best thing: he transplants Jeremy’s brain into an artificial body. Jeremy’s brother Henry (John Baragrey), a specialist in automation, helps with the operation. He also keeps everything secret from Jeremy’s widow Anne and his son Billy (Mala Powers & Charles Herbert). Family friend Dr. John Carrington (Robert Hutton) stays close to the Spensser mansion as well. William and Henry help Jeremy adjust to a new existence as a cyborg. But Jeremy feels like a ghost in his massive metallic body.

A year later, Jeremy-cyborg has developed extra-sensory perception. He secretly meets with Billy, who mistakes him for a storybook giant. Enraged by William’s deceptions and Henry’s romantic overtures to Anne, Jeremy-cyborg unleashes a grandiose revenge on the treacherous world, starting with a symbol of the ‘useless humanity’ he once loved — the United Nations.

Colossus was co-written by Thelma Schnee Moss, who later ran the UCLA parapsychology unit that helped popularize the notion of Kirlian photography. (My college friend Clark Dugger worked for Moss; I reported on her activities in my old DVD Savant review for The Entity.)  The cyborg has a couple of thing in common with the original 1920 German Golem, including the monster’s jealousy and a prominent OFF switch tucked under his armpit. Little Billy’s secret meetings with his friendly Iron Giant can’t help but seem little perverse: “Billy! Don’t ever touch me there!”

The caped Colossus is impressive when he clomps about like a mechanical Roman Senator. Our attention soon goes to the little screens under his eyes, that allow actor Ed Wolff to see where he’s going. Among the things that go unexplained is the monster’s new ability to project death rays from his electronic eyeballs.

Production Code disapproval is avoided by suggesting that a human spirit will turn evil if removed from its God-approved original body. The script doesn’t really investigate Jeremy’s human / robot identity issues. Good wife Anne never comes face-to-face with her ‘new’ Jeremy, an opportunity not missed in the later brain-transplant films Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and RoboCop.  Jeremy-cyborg can’t discuss the sanctity of life or the meaning of marriage, but he is allowed to go berserk and kill a lot of people.

The bizarre finale depicts a massacre at the United Nations — committed by an anti-Peacenik Nobel Peace Prize winner. Eugène Lourié’s restricted camera angles lend this final scene a dreamlike quality. The various U.N. dignitaries stand in place on a broad checkerboard floor, waiting patiently to be fried by death rays added by opticals artist John P. Fulton. Something went wrong in negative assembly, for a continuity goof shows a woman dead on the shiny U.N. floor, before we see her being ray-blasted. Adding to the weirdness, nobody comes to the aid of this woman or any of the other fallen dignitaries.

Worth a special mention is the film’s dramatic music score, a piano duet composed by the prolific (Nathan Lang) Van Cleave. The alternative to new orchestration was apparently mandated by a 1958 musicians’ strike. For a few months, studios recorded film scores overseas and in some cases did without them altogether.

The Colossus of New York rounds out as a sober exercise, unless kids got a laugh from the robot’s mock-paternal talks with Billy, or if they giggled to see him striding calmly up the bottom of New York’s East River. The sight of the soggy Colossus stepping up out of the river begs the question: are they the same waterside steps James Stewart uses to carry Kim Novak out of San Francisco Bay?  The two movies were filmed at the same studio around the same time.

Destination Inner Space
1966 / 1:85 widescreen / 83 min.
Starring: Scott Brady, Sheree North, Gary Merrill, Wende Wagner, Mike Road … Hugh Maddox
John Howard John Howard, Biff Elliot, Roy Barcroft, James Hong.
Cinematography: Brick Marquand
Art Director: Paul Sylos Jr.
Amphibian Creator: Richard Cassarino
Film Editor: Robert S. Eisen
Original Music: Paul Dunlap
Written by Arthur C. Pierce
Produced by Earle Lyon
Directed by Francis D. Lyon

Back in 1966, excited by Sci-fi romps like Fantastic Voyage, we jumped at Ivan Tors’ well-promoted feature Around the World Under the Sea. Once seated, we found ourselves watching TV faces standing around talking tech gibberish and watching bubbles go by the portholes of their submarine craft. Tors diluted his brand name with increasingly inane variations on his ‘cute animal’ formula, and his underwater adventures.

Other producers with good TV connections packaged quickie movies, grabbing stray name actors for marquee value and making easy sales to film and TV. Harold Goldman associates pushed forward a quartet of Sci-fi thrillers with stars like Michael Rennie, Richard Egan and Jeffrey Hunter.  Cyborg 2087 and  Dimension 5 were both released on Blu-ray by Kino but no longer show up in their directory.  The Destructors (1968) remains a hard to-see item. This collection debuts  Destination Inner Space in a beautiful-quality Blu-ray transfer.

Director Francis D. Lyon is associated with three of the Goldman films, but their creative center may be Arthur C. Pierce, a writer involved in Sci-fi fantasy as far back as 1955’s 3-D short subject  The Adventures of Sam Space. Pierce has writing credits on a stack of underachieving oddities that are now easy to see ( The Cosmic Man,  Terror in the Midnight Sun,  Beyond the Time Barrier).  A second group of Pierce-written productions remains AWOL on legit disc: ( The Human Duplicators,  Mutiny in Outer Space,  The Navy vs. the Night Monsters).

Destination Inner Space is the most-seen Goldman film thanks to some colorful underwater scenes that curiously go uncredited. Aerial footage of a speedboat leads the way to some professionally-shot scuba action with doubles for the film’s actors. An underwater sealab is an unimpressive miniature, and its interior a dreary set; every so often an actor will wander over to a view-window that looks as if it were filmed elsewhere, at an aquarium park. The low-tech tech equipment is chosen for its color appeal — the wet suits are in bright hues. It’s the kind of content that would garner an instant sale from an overworked TV syndication exec. Do you think  TV buyers actually watched A.I.P.’s dreadful made-for-TV drek before signing contracts?

The script feels cut-&-pasted from previous shows. The structure copies Alex Gordon’s  The Atomic Submarine, a movie about a sub that encounters a flying saucer under the polar ice cap. Divers transfer to the saucer and bring back a cylinder that, sure enough, hatches an aquatic monster. Scenes and situations are lifted almost verbatim from  Atomic Submarine  (a lame male-male grudge about a past military misdeed),  It! The Terror from Beyond Space  (the effort to lock the monster in a different compartment) and  The Thing from another World  (the heroine accidentally revives the supposedly tranquilized monster).

We’re impressed by the professionalism of the actors, who give the producers more than their money’s worth. Overweight Scott Brady struggles to don his underwater gear, but can play the overbearing he-bull military dude Commander Wayne in his sleep. Sheree North’s Dr. Rene Peron dutifully trades idiotic sex tease banter with Brady. Gary Merrill dishes out the science talk as the chief scientist, Dr. LaSatier. Merrill’s  All About Eve days were long gone; it’s nice that he retained his rep as a class act, when most of his career was spent in much less distinguished material.

Writer Pierce teams a hothead frogman named Hugh Maddox (Mike Road) with Sandra Welles (Wende Wagner), a scuba-diving scientist along to scream at the monster. Ms. Wagner manages to keep her dignity despite the circumstances. So does the recently-honored James Hong. He is more than agreeable as a stereotyped Chinese cook, complete with fractured accent.

The elaborate monster is a scaly blue fish-man with a silly face.  It’s better constructed than the dumb seaweed creatures in  War-Gods of the Deep but laughable just the same. It appears to have a big lumpy back so as to incorporate a scuba tank inside the suit. But the monster should be something better, like almost everything else in the show: a real character, an interesting scene or a surprising physical effect.

Production values are bland, with no attempt at anything but flat TV lighting, or standard just-do-it direction. What we admire most are Brady, North and Merrill’s professional, attitude-free contributions. That’s not to imply that anything good happens in the movie.

The original Variety review for Destination Inner Space is so flattering, you’d think that the reviewer “Dool” had been paid off. The top line reads thusly:

“A spine-tingling Sci-fi pic. Production values are top-grade and underwater sequences well done.”

… and,  “Mike Road, handsome and brooding, also brings a strong masculine flavor to his role.”

Yikes.

The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray of Sci-Fi Chillers Collection gives us all three pictures in excellent encodings. The package text claims “HD Masters by Paramount Pictures, from 4K Scans.” We can’t fault anything about the remastering work. The B&W  Unknown and  Colossus share a disc, while the color  Destination gets a platter to itself.

There is indeed a customer base that wants extras, and Kino makes an effort to enhance what are not first-rank attractions with intelligent expert input. All three features bear commentaries. The research-driven Tom Weaver and his associates handle the track for  The Colossus of New York, accessing Weaver’s older interviews. Tom compares the film with the screenplay in full detail. Stephen R. Bissette knows his monster movies well, and brings original thought to his track for  The Unknown Terror. He says that the giant cave set was built at Producers’ Studio, on ordinary sound stages. He also admits an unusual personal interest in fungus!

Aided by Stan Shaffer, David Del Valle contributes a chatty discussion about the pros and cons of  Destination Inner Space. It can’t be easy pretending that the show is worth the effort — you’d need a surviving actor to tell an inside story or confirm one’s theories, and they’re all long gone. With so little known about these marginal pictures, some commentators have little choice but to recite lists of movies and credits for the actors.

Tim Lucas’s forte isn’t Sci-fi or special effects, but he and Steve Bissette enliven two of the features with ‘Sidebar’ video discussions formatted as side-by-side Zoom feeds. The images show their respective offices to be stacked with books and research material.  Lucas and Bissette do well talking off the cuff, filling lengthy time slots. It’s like a video podcast, and not a bad idea — what they did for Barbarella last year was very entertaining. Destination Inner Space taxes their ingenuity and our patience, but that’s show biz.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Sci-Fi Chillers Collection
Blu-ray rates:
Movies:  Unknown Good,  Colossus Good +,  Destination Fair +
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
The Unknown Terror:
New audio commentary by Stephen Bissette
The Colossus of New York:
New audio commentary Tom Weaver, Larry Blamire, Ron Adams
New sidebar video discussion with Tim Lucas and Steven Bissette
Trailer
Destination Inner Space:
New audio commentary with David Del Valle and Stan Shaffer
New sidebar video discussion with Tim Lucas and Steven Bissette.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: Two Blu-rays in Keep case
Reviewed: May 30, 2024
(7138scif)

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Here’s William Malone on The Colossus of New York: