So which classics of Hollywood's golden age were lavished with such cinephile splendor. Well...
The Brain from Planet Arous (1957) boasts the biggest star power in this quartet of films, and that star is John Agar of The Mole People and Revenge of the Creature. Here he is shortly after ducking out on his contract with Universal because he was sick of science-fiction flicks. So what was his next career move after saying goodbye to typecasting and a major studio? Starring in a no-budget indie in which he is controlled by a floating, chatty space brain intent on taking over Earth. Sound goofy? I haven't even gotten to the part where a benign rival alien brain possesses Agar's girlfriend's dog. You can't say it isn't original, and it would be good dumb fun if the possessed guy didn't constantly try to sexually assault his girlfriend. Agar's pit stains deserved their own credit.
Monster from Green Hell (1957) is written, acted, and directed with all the polish of a kindergarten pantomime. A radiation-infused wasp the size of Beaver Stadium terrorizes some unfortunate African native stereotypes. The big plastic wasp is great, as is all the stock footage of real elephants, lions, wildebeests, and zebras in the wild. Joel Fluellen rises above the film's rampant racism in a reasonably meaty role for a black actor in a fifties flick, and he comports himself as well as anyone could when expected to voice lines like "The animals flee from Green Hell...this I have seen: the small monkeys and the large elephants!"
Frankenstein's Daughter (1958) is the movie most specifically aimed at the matinee crowd with its teen (Sandra Knight) who undergoes nocturnal transformations after her uncle's lab assistant, Dr. Frankenstein's grandson (Donald Murphy), spikes her punch. Young Frankenstein mows down another girl (Sally Todd) with his car and grafts her head onto a man's body, a combo he claims is beneficial since her female brain will make the monster more likely to take orders from a man. Woof. Somehow getting hit by a car makes Playboy playmate Sally Todd look like Rondo Hatton, but Knight's makeup is hilariously goggle-eyed, Murphy is hilariously leery-eyed, and hilarious comedy legend Harold Lloyd's only son appears as one of the teenaged ding dongs. Hilarious.
The Brain from Planet Arous may have the most recognizable face on screen of all these movies, but behind the camera, no one beats the makeup artist behind Giant from the Unknown (1958). Jack P. Pierce was the lab-coated genius who'd conjured Universal's original Frankenstein Monster, the Mummy, Bride of Frankenstein, and the Wolf Man. For dedicated monster kids, Pierce is right up there with Karloff and Lugosi. By 1958, Universal was 22 years in Pierce's rearview mirror, and he was taking work where he could get it, mostly in TV, which included four years on Mister Ed. Buddy Baer's hulking murderous conquistador may not be as iconic as Boris Karloff's monster, or even Mister Ed's Mister Ed, but Pierce's claylike makeup design, which recalls the Golem of silent film just as the Frankenstein Monster did, is an effectively creepy touch in a movie that is otherwise talky, stiffly acted, casually racist (Native Americans are the target this time), and slower than a Warhol film.
There are no hidden gems amongst the Monster Mayhem Collection, so what of the supplemental stuff and presentation? Well, most of its commentaries and featurettes are actually already out there by way of the Film Detective's individual blu-ray releases of these movies from 2022. I haven't seen any of those discs, so I can't judge the Film Masters' new editions against them, but the Detective and the Masters were founded by the same person, so there's a good chance the scans are the same too. Each film suffers from excessive grain that positively dances around the screen. Artifacts are present in each film, though they're most prevalent in Monster from Green Hell, a mostly black and white picture that also sports a fairly putrid looking color finale. The best looking film is Frankenstein's Daughter. Its grain is not nearly as distracting as that of the other movies and it has the least amount of damage. Its details are also bolder and more distinct than those of the other films, which look pretty soft.
If the scans are the same as the Film Detective's, the discs themselves are certainly different, as two films appear on each of these new discs and some of the 2022 extras are absent. The one new addition is horror historian Tom Weaver's booklet essay, which exhibits the wit and self-awareness the movies it accompanies lack.
