14 | June | 2014 | Lasers, monsters and barbarians oh, my!

Wait, this is a horror movie?

1958

This farm family who appear to live not far from LA so they aren’t all that country, but this car is a water witch. If that meant she could ride a summon up a fifty foot tall wave and ride on top and command then that would be cool. Instead it means she walks around with a Y shaped stick and it will lead her to under ground water-not as cool. This time it leads her to a decapitated talking head that once belonged to a conquistador -what the heck? Only now the head is looking for it’s body, but it can control these yokels to do it’s evil bidding- kill this person, carry me there, find my body, blow my nose. There is nothing else going on at this farm so these people follow this old, lumpy, mumbling head. “Must obey the silly head!”. Eventually even the water witch is controlled by the head and she uses her powers to find the body that is connected to the head and the foot bone is connected to the ankle bone and the ankle bone is connected to the wait I think there was a movie going on. Oh, yeah they dig up the body, but it’s in a coffin so they carry the coffin inside and my doesn’t it look lovely like a coffee table of the dead. Oh wait hey bring that head over here and put it with the body and bomp it fits and the conquistador lives. Well a hammy actor pretends to be a conquistador anyways, he makes Lost in space’s Dr. Smith’s theatrics seem low key by comparison. The lumpy conquistador will rule the entire farm and then the world! The people standing around pull out a cross and bloop old conquistadoofus goes down like a sack of ancient potatoes and he turns into a skeleton. Take that, poor excuse for an ancient evil! Roll the credits.

The negatives-This film is ultra low budget despite being done by big name universal-they were cutting costs on films a lot in 1958 and were glad to do a film like this with not much costs. The acting ranges from okay to cringe worthy.

The positives-I first saw this in the late 1990’s and kind of liked despite it’s shortcomings. I like a horror on an isolated farm and I like the conquistador as the villain.

Apparently this film actually did fairly well when it came out because it was lucky enough to be paired up with Hammer’s The Horror of Dracula over here in the states. The original working title was “The water witch”, I think they chose a better title for the finished product.

Aw, man decapitated head for dinner again?

Yes, my face fell in the oatmeal again.

This is the cover of hair metal/AOR band Danger Danger’s 2nd album “Screw it” from 1991. So they took a huge a monkey and made him look like a motorcycle gang member. Although given their weak songs he couldn’t be too tough since he sports their logo on his denim vest.

This is a new album from an act called Hollywood Monsters. Some semi-young guitarist somehow lured Tim Bogert (Cactus, Vanilla Fudge) Vinnie Appice (Dio, Black Sabbath) and long time journeyman Don Airey into playing on this rather avergae product. However the cover does feature a Kong like monkey battling a dinosaur over a Capitol records building.

This is the back cover of the CD version of Staus Quo’s rather good 1972 release Piledriver. Instead of coveting a blond or a giant banana he’s hanging onto a big old missile with the album title on it for some reason.