Icons of Horror Collection: Sam Katzman
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (SRP $24.96) Street Date: Oct. 16

I wouldn’t consider Sam Katzman an icon of horror. I don’t know anybody who would. On the other hand, I don’t know anybody who doesn’t enjoy his movies, either. Katzman (1901-1973) was a movie producer who made movies. He didn’t make good ones, or expensive ones. He made cheap crowd pleasers and if you were part of the crowd that went to them, you probably had a good time. His films weren’t for folks who’d gotten lost on their way to Amarcord or The Lion in Winter; they were for kids looking for thrills, scares or rock ‘n’ roll. In the Katzman filmography, which lasted from the mid-1930s through the end of the 1960s, you’ll find westerns (Code of the Cactus, 1939, with Tim McCoy), East Side Kids movies (Bowery Blitzkrieg, 1941), Bela Lugosi Monogram shockers (Voodoo Man, 1944), Jungle Jim backlot thrillers (Pygmy Island, 1950), rockers (Juke Box Rhythm, 1959), and even an Elvis movie (Harem Scarum, 1965). You won’t find quality, although to be fair, his pictures were no worse and usually better than like Poverty Row product.

What Katzman is best remembered for today, besides being cheap… make that “thrifty”… are his serials, which are many (Katzman was the guy who decided in 1948 that rather than hang Kirk Alyn from wires, a cartoon flying Superman would work just as well), and his horror films, which is the subject of our review today inasmuch as Sony has just graced us with the second of their Icons of Horror collections (following Boris Karloff), devoted to four prime Katzman sci-fi/horror thrillers of the 1950s. Following the lead of Warners Bros., who toss bonus vintage shorts and cartoons at us as freely as if they were sealant tape on DVD packaging, Sony has given us some juicy extras, too, making this one of the cult surprise treats of the year.

First, the films themselves, all drive-in favorites of the 1950s that found new homes on TV creature features in the decades to follow and are now presented in all their digital glory. Here In The Balcony, we find them all equally endearing and entertaining, so we’ll take ‘em alphabetically:

Creature with the Atom Brain (1955, directed by Edward L. Cahn) stars Richard Denning as a humorless detective on the search for a superhuman killer that smashes through iron bars and can’t be stopped by bullets. It turns out that a mad scientist and his gangster buddy are using reanimated, nuclear-powered corpses to settle old scores. Oddly enough, the monsters resemble Ed Asner after a frontal lobotomy. The only film in the set not in anamorphic widescreen, and some minor film damage is evident during the first reel. I played with the film’s ratio several times, and couldn’t decide whether it should’ve been widescreen or not; I finally matted the darn thing. The sound quality on this one is particularly excellent, and the nuclear lab toys (left over from Katzman’s serial The Lost Planet) present a quite entertaining cacophony.

The Giant Claw (1957, directed by Fred F. Sears) is notorious for its monster, a massive puppet bird that resembles a massive muppet Big Bird. It may well be the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen Robot Monster (for the uninitiated, Robot Monster is… well, forget it. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you). Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday are on the trail of true romance and a battleship-sized buzzard that eats military planes. One of the great entertaining “bad movies” of its era, and if you can watch this without howling, I’ll be surprised. If you watch it as a double feature with Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), you’ll get the bonus treat of seeing the same special effects of buildings falling and stock footage of people running in terror, over and over again.

A nice change of pace, The Werewolf (1956, directed by Sears) (1) is set in a small mountain community with a cast of unknowns, even to genre fans; (2) doesn’t feature big, mishandled special effects, and (3) is a quality movie. A pair of scientists turn Steven Ritch into a werewolf, but not the ol’ fashioned wolfbane, full moon, gypsy camp variety. No, he turns into a werewolf whenever he gets angry or depressed, and he was angry and depressed a lot in those days. You’ll never see a werewolf movie with so much daylight footage of the wolf attacking, and so it’s a good thing that the lycanthrope and his makeup are both shockingly effective. This film has always been a favorite of mine, and the widescreen edition looks and sounds terrific. Easily the gem of the set.

On the other claw, Zombies of Mora Tau (1957, directed by Cahn) I hadn’t seen before, and I’d never heard anything good about it, either. To my surprise, then, it turns out to be a cheap but effective thriller with Allison Hayes and a crew of lowlife treasure seekers on the prowl for a sunken chest full of diamonds, the drawback to their escapade being that the chest is guarded by the sunken ship’s crew, long dead but still lurking about in the dark. The underwater scenes perhaps set a new low in special effects, even for Katzman (filmed through a dirty lens, everybody walks slowly and a machine on the back of the diver puts up a couple of small bubbles of the “wave your bubble wand” variety every few minutes). For whatever reason, this one actually looks the best of the four films screened.

Taken together, we have a quartet of absolutely can’t-miss horrors of the 1950s, as enjoyable as any cult release this year, and this year gave us four Cult Classics boxed sets from Warners and a slew of Midnite Movies from MGM/Fox. Even better, though, are the generous and rare bonuses Sony through in.

These days, hardly anybody remembers the comedy team of Tom Kennedy and Monte Collins; they starred in fewer than a dozen 2-reel shorts for Columbia in the mid 1930s. The best of those shorts, Midnight Blunders (1935, directed by Del Lord) makes its home video debut here. Tom & Monte are looking for a wooden-legged Chinese doctor who controls a giant monster. Chills and laughs, and if Sony decides to release more of the hundreds of non-Three Stooges short comedies in their vaults, I’ll personally wash the cars of every executive once a week.

Also included is a cartoon, Terror Faces Magoo, as the mansion of the nearsighted Mr. Magoo is invaded by a gorilla, and an episode of the 1951 Katzman-produced serial Mysterious Island (directed by Spencer Bennet), which offers the delightful return of Buster Crabbe’s shirts from Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940) and Warren Hull's masks from The Spider’s Web (1938).

Finally, there are trailers for all four films, plus bonus Columbia sci-fi trailers, including the wonderful Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, and they all feature the typical effective hyperbole (“Fission science creates an electronic monster so terrifying only SCREAMS can describe it!”).

Icons of Horror Collection: Sam Katzman is great memento of the kinds of movies they don’t make anymore, or an excellent introduction to good low-budget monster films of the 1950s. Whether you remember these films well or weren’t born when they were released, you’ll enjoy this package, one of the best genre releases of the season. Sony, great job!