The Deal Breaker

The Beast With a Million Eyes / Phantom From 10,000 Leagues - both 1955
These are two incredibly dull 50s ‘creature’ (and I use this term lightly) features that, like I did, you can grab of on a double disk. Wow are these two films extremely exasperating. There’s a deal breaker with all of these movies, and that’s the creature. You get a good one (A Harryhausen one would be nice) and your onto a winner, no matter how shoddy the script or acting. Get a bad one and you’ve lost the audience, because lets face it most of these genre films have by the number plots and a casts of unknowns. We the audience are here for our love of the formulas and most of all our love of the creatures. Spectacularly these two don’t really have creatures at all! And when they can be bothered to ‘reveal’ it to us the creature is in fact utter bollocks. So our creature in the Phantom from 10,000 leagues (who by the way would struggle to reach a league) is a man with a lizard hat on, and our beast with a thousand eyes, well for most of the films we're teased with sub plots involving the guy next door and Sandy's dog, only to discover the beast is indeed a metaphor! Thats right, this one really grinds your gears by giving you no creature at all, not even a man in a lizard hat. Now don’t get me wrong the lack of budget and polish isn’t the issue with low budget b-movies, it’s the lack of imagination that lets these two down. These are two efforts trading on the great titles of the genre and the era, the ‘It Came Froms’ the ‘The Terror Froms’. They have fantastic titles and awesome poster art, but that’s about all I’m afraid. Ebay the posters, Youtube the trailers, forget the movies.

Like b-movies? Try almost anything else but these. If you know of worse than the 'Metaphor With a Million Metaphoric Eyes' please let me know!