DANCE AWAY

 

Hepcats get hip in The Horror Of Party Beach (1964), a genuinely terrible film made all the worse by having some quite good elements, not least some of the music and the editing, which is excellent. 

In it, a radioactive waste spill on the ocean floor turns the skeletons of long dead sailors into rubbery looking monsters with big googly eyes and a grudge against teenagers. As there are hundreds of them constantly frugging on the beach, the monsters assume someone has laid on a buffet and proceed to kill as many as they can. Only sodium can stop them, and lots of it. It's quite gory, really, but the monsters are made unscary by looking exactly like our old mate the Soup Dragon from The Clangers.

Anyway, there's a lot of dancing (see above).

TWEET

 

PINK PHINK

I hate Pink Panther films, but I love Pink Panther cartoons. 

The cartoons are inconsistent, and some feature The Panther as a mere bit player in a seemingly pre-drawn scenario, or as a schmuck at the mercy of outside agencies. The true Pink Panther character is, however, a ruthless, selfish, pitiless maniac, an unemployed, unattached creature that walks the earth being a nuisance, sashaying unbidden into peoples lives and fucking them up.  

Take The Pink Phink, the award winning first ever Pink Panther cartoon (it won an Oscar for the best animated short of 1964). The Panther is mooching around smoking when he comes across a big nosed workman (usually known as 'the Little Man'') who is painting a house blue. The Panther decides he wants it pink. Positively pink. What follows is a six minute duel between the two characters and the two colour schemes. 

In the end, the Little Man man has a nervous breakdown as the house, the garden, the sky, even the sun, all turn pink. As a final display of his uncanny, monstrous power, the Pink Panther paints the Little Man pink, too. 

Bastard. 

A MILLION MAD CLOCKS

The Outer Limits: The Form Of Things Unknown, d. Gerd Oswald (1964)

‘Mr. Hobart tinkers with time, just as time tinkers with Mr. Hobart’

This episode was the last of the first series, and was originally planned as the pilot for a new anthology show called The Unknown. It is as weird as hell, comprising an strange, disjointed plot, sinister performances, some arty and experimental camera work and an overwrought atmosphere that wouldn’t seem out of place in one of Tennessee Williams’ more hysterical psychodramas.

The story involves the poisoning of a gigolo by two women, and his subsequent resurrection by a once dead scientist who is now stuck in the realm of the living due to the intervention of his time machine, which comprises a 'million mad clocks' and a thousand taut pieces of wire. The scientist wants to go back to whatever lies beyond the grave, and the two women want the gigolo dead again. All three will get what they want, but not until fifty minutes of tense and unsettling television has played out.

The most impenetrable episode yet, the show is made of shadows and madness and is actually quite scary in its own way, not least in the fact that it makes the viewer wonder if what they are seeing is really there, or whether they themselves are having some sort of breakdown.  

AS MUTE AND PALE AS DEATH ITSELF

The Outer Limits: The Bellero Shield, d. John Brahm (1964)

The best episodes of The Outer Limits always have a baleful, ominous atmosphere, as if madness and death and isolation are in the air waiting to manifest themselves. It’s a deeply strange programme, too, often unnervingly so, and The Bellero Shield is a particularly odd one, Macbeth with science and a luminous alien.

A laser scientist accidentally catches an extraterrestrial in a beam of light, and brings him, somewhat unwillingly, to Earth. The alien, a shimmering, indistinct thing from a dimension just above our realm, initially protects himself using an impenetrable and all-encompassing shield, technology coveted by the scientists ambitious and slightly unhinged wife. When the alien tries to go home, she shoots him in the head and steals the shield technology, intending to pass off the invention as her husband’s in order to make his reputation. 

Pressing a button to activate something is one thing, of course; switching it off is entirely another…