Review: '“Twice the Thrills! Twice the Chills!” Horror and Science Fiction Double Features, 1955-1974'

Cinema had to scramble when a new invasive species called television sprouted up in the 1950s. Big budget production companies dealt with the new threat by making the kinds of big, boisterous, Technicolor epics television could never match. Small budget companies countered with cagey gimmicks, such as 3D, Aroma-rama, and Emergo. More practical, slightly less desperate, and certainly more enduring was the practice of renting two films for the price of one to theaters. Thus, the double feature was officially born. Movie goers could buy one ticket to take in a pair of AIPs like A Bucket of Blood and The Giant Leeches, a pair of Hammers like Dracula, Prince of Darkness and Plague of the Zombies, a European art-horror like Les Yeux Sans Visage matched with a schlocker like The Manster, or an odd couple like Rosemary’s Baby and The Odd Couple.

Bryan Senn’s new book “Twice the Thrills! Twice the Chills!” Horror and Science Fiction Double Features, 1955-1974 pays tribute to the double-decade year period when creepy, kooky double features ruled matinees. This thick volume is not quite a film guide—the entries on each double-bill are way too long and way too loaded with production information. It’s not quite a history—only a 12-page introduction and brief paragraphs prefacing each entry deal with double bills directly. Whatever it is, it’s a ball. Senn does what a topic such as this deserves. His synopses, historical details, and choices of anecdotes are consistently entertaining and a sufficiently sarcastic, reflecting the fun of scarfing down a bucket of popcorn while devouring delightful crap like The Brain That Wouldn’t Die and sneaking out of the theater before having to suffer through Invasion of the Star Creatures. His cheeky critiques are spot on, and when he and I disagree, he makes totally fair arguments for his points of view. Sometimes his jokey comments are sheer corn, but that suits the atmosphere of B-grade merriment too. The package is nicely illustrated with B&W images of lobby cards, posters, and press-book pages. Maybe it’s no longer easy to hunt down an actual double feature in your local theater, but “Twice the Thrills! Twice the Chills!” is such a blast that it will likely inspire you to host one in your own home.

Review: 'American International Pictures: A Comprehensive Filmography'

In the sixties, James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff’s American International Pictures was best known for pumping out a series of dopey beach party flicks, Roger Corman’s elegant Poe adaptations, and a gonzo slew of fab B-grade genre pictures. However, AIP was even more eclectic than that, distributing prestige foreign films such as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and La Dolce Vita and films by Robert Altman and Orson Welles and trafficking in Mondo-style documentaries and borderline porno. In all, AIP and its subsidiaries had their talons in over 800 movies. With his new book American International Pictures: A Comprehensive Filmography, Rob Craig attempts to catalog them all. This would be quite the project if Craig had merely tracked down all the titles and listed them, but he goes way farther than that with encyclopedia-like entries for each film, some of which fill entire pages. He covers interesting production details, describes plots, and offers personal critiques and a good deal of sub-textual analysis.

This is where American International Pictures: A Comprehensive Filmography serves its most useful purpose, since the book mainly functions as a film guide. I can usually get a pretty good handle on how much a film-guide writer and I see eye-to-eye and how likely I will be to dig that writer’s recommendations. However, Rob Craig is a tough call. He’s generally politically astute, writes well, and loves many oddball movies deserving of love, but he’s too hell bent on iconoclasm, which is something he signals in an introduction that explicitly challenges notions that some films are or aren’t objectively good. That’s fine, but I can’t get on board with some of Craig’s kookier ideas. I agree with him that Peter Sasdy’s The Devil within Her is a lot of fun, but Craig’s conclusion that it is better than Rosemary’s Baby—a deliberately hilarious film he categorizes as “humorless”—is crazy (Polanski’s still a horrible person though). He thinks Starcrash is better than Star Wars (another movie he dismisses as “humorless) and can’t stand beloved character actor Dick Miller, yet he finds much to admire in crap such as the tedious Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, the vile Cry of the Banshee, the inept and vile The Last House on the Left, and the shrill, painfully unfunny Comedy of Terrors, which he believes has “hilarious” dialogue. Who is this guy?

And wait ’til you read his entries on The T.A.M.I. Show and The Big TNT Show! He is merciless in his castigation of some of the sixties’ greatest acts, dismissing The Beach Boys as a “pathetic” boy band, deeming The Lovin’ Spoonful “bizarre,” trashing The Rolling Stones and The Byrds, and having little patience for James Brown, whose performance once inspired an entire movie theater audience to leap up in the aisles and dance (I was there). His chastising of the film’s use of some chaste go-go dancers as “perverted” is way more bizarre than anything the Spoonful ever did. Yet, I agreed with Craig in enough instances that I still managed to compile a list of films I’d like to check out on his recommendation. He certainly does a good job of making the movies he likes sound intriguing. Whether or not I enjoy them may be another matter.

The Revenge of Some Classic Horror Novelizations

Horror historian Philip J. Riley recently announced the NightMare Series, a new reprint line of classic novelizations of classic Hammer and AIP flicks. First up will be Dean Owen’s 1960 book based on Brides of Dracula. The Revenge of Frankenstein follows. Nine other titles with new introductions are already in the works.