New Movies This Week

The new offerings are pretty slim-- Hulu's been going strong lately, so I guess we can live with the occasional dry spell. This week, we get a handful of d-list horror movies from the late fifties/early sixties. There's also a 1996 dragon movie that is a product of the industry's fumbling early attempts at CGI/reality integration (ten years ago it was groundbreaking, but now it looks like Pete's Dragon: The Sequel).




The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues
http://www.hulu.com/the-phantom-from-10000-leagues
A monster movie about a creature from the depths that is terrorizing the beaches of California. This proves that all you need to shoot a movie is a camera, a rubber suit, and a bunch of bikinis. Actually, you don't need bikinis. You just need a drawing of one for the promotional poster.

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Terror is a Man
http://www.hulu.com/terror-is-a-man
This is an obvious knockoff of The Isle of Dr. Moreau. Like that classic scifi novel, it features a shipwrecked sailor, a mad scientist, and an effort to create a human from an animal (in this case, a panther). What island in the world is populated by panthers? Blood Island, of course.

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The Crawling Hand
http://www.hulu.com/the-crawling-hand
This is one of those horrible horror movies that's been immortalized by the Mystery Science Theater folks. A lost astronaut returns to earth-- or at least his HAND DOES!!!! The hand has an agenda that involves strangulation and, of course, crawling.

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Dragonheart
http://www.hulu.com/dragonheart
Dennis Quaid is a dragonslayer. But Sean Connery is Draco, his secret dragon pal. How can the two of them pull off a revolt against the evil king, who shares a magical heart that ensures that zzzzzzzzzz. Sorry, dozed off for a minute there. This actually got a 50% approval rating from Rotten Tomatoes, so it is probably the best new movie of the week. Personally, I'd rather see the spectacularly bad than the halfway decent, so I'll be queuing up "The Crawling Hand" or "The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues" before I consider "Dragonheart."

To get a taste, here's a clip from "The Crawling Hand." Everything about it is classic, from the way the hand jumps from the floor to the woman's neck, to the heavily panting corpse.