"The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues" (1956) on Hulu Plus and Youtube

"Why the gloom? Dad's just been acquitted of murder."

     The Milner Brothers tell you this movie is cut rate right from jump street. It's there in the title: "The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues", it lets you know you are getting fifty percent of the leagues Disney gave you two year's earlier. The title is a bit misleading, though. The titular "phantom" is barely in the picture. Despite the fact that the movie starts right off with the creature attacking (well, it's more like pawing) a fisherman in a rowboat, what the film is mainly concerned with is people talking endlessly, usually on the beach in suit's.

   
     The "phantom" creature is an impossibly goofy looking thing, a near immobile "Creature From the Black Lagoon" knock-off with a macrocephalic dragon head. When the dead fisherman's body washes ashore, it's found by the only two people on the desolate stretch of beach: William Grant (Rodney Bell), a government agent, and "Ted Baxter" (Kent Taylor), who introduces himself as a "tourist and beach comber", but is really Dr. Stevens, a world renowned oceanographer, who has studied the effects of radioactivity on marine life. The production clearly had access to a small stretch of beach to film on, and it's the stage for much of the film. There's a completely unintentional bleak poetry to many of the beach scenes, looking something like the California schlock version of a Bergman film.

     Watching the two men from a hiding spot is George Thomas (Phillip Pine), a shady character who in his first scene is as he is in almost all his scenes: holding a spear gun. Seriously, he is almost never without one. George is after the atomic secrets of the mysterious Professor King (Michael Whalen). He's the true villain of the piece. It should've been titled, "The Guy Named George From the Beach", but I guess that doesn't really put asses in the seats. The nefarious interests George works for are represented by a blond named Wanda (Helene Stanton). In an odd but kind of cool move that may be artistic, but is more than likely lazy, she just sits under a parasol on the beach for almost the entirety of her screen time.

     Prof. King looks like a doughy, rumpled version of Robert Ryan and delivers wonderfully hammy overwrought dialogue, as when he addresses his secretary, "Ethel, I consider you an intelligent woman. A bit bitter, perhaps. No great lover of mankind, but still intelligent..." His laboratory emits really neat electronic sounds and it's here he irradiates a turtle and I think turns it into the phantom. I think. I'm not really sure. The movie is kind of unclear on that. It's kind of unclear on a lot of things.

     Milner shows a bit of noirish panache when he uses Ethel's (Vivi Janiss) shadow to give away that she is eavesdropping on King and Stevens. Now, I'm not saying the guy is an expressionist wunderkind, just that it demonstrates at least some degree of creative ingenuity when it comes to the visuals and I wanted to give some kind of prop's to this movie I'm not being very nice to. Milner even manages to slip a little cheesecake into the mix when Dr. Stevens stops by the Professor's place at the very same time his daughter, Lois (Cathy Downs), is taking a shower.

      Taylor is a classic fifties B cinema leading man- great hair, some clothes I'd kill for and a bit too old for his love interest. During a long rambling scene he tells the Professor he knows "There's a shaft of light coming up out of the ocean, I have reason to believe it's nuclear in character...", he's seen the monster guarding it firsthand and fears the light could be weaponized. I watched the scene twice in an attempt to decipher it's nonsensical pseudo scientific prose, but both times my eyes glazed over with disinterest. But, the concept of a monster guarding a powerful column of light does have a certain kind of mythological resonance, as if Milner is taking primal archetypal imagery and rendering it down for the drive-in make out crowd.

     There's a contract with the audience when it comes to older B creature features: stick with the movie through the plodding plot build up and you'll be rewarded with the monster stuff you actually came for at the end. "Phantom From 10,000 Leagues" violates that contract. The poor phantom is a bit player in his own movie, barely having any screentime. In the "Black Lagoon" rip off power rankings, this dude is below "The Monster of Piedras Blancas" and "The Horror of Party Beach".

     The Milner Brothers "From Hell It Came", made two years later, represents fifties psychotronic cinema at it's most batshit fun, unfortunately "Phantom From 10,000 Leagues" represents it at it's most boring and snooze inducing; a thoughtless programmer designed just to kill time and fill a slot on a double bill. The fact that a movie containing almost nothing but talking could have so little plot is a miracle. This flick barely counts as a story, hell it barely qualifies as a movie. It's a midnight movie that will have you asleep by 12:15.

   

"From Hell It Came" (1957) on Warner Archive Instant

   

     It came from where? From hell. What did? A wild, undead creature of vengeance. Like what, a demon goat with nine legs, shooting fireballs from it's six eyes? Ok, not that wild. Then what is it? A stiff, lumbering kind of tree thing with a face. Oh. From Dan Milner, editor of "Bozo the Clown" amongst many other thing's, co-written and produced by his sound engineer brother Jack, "From Hell It Came" is an uber fifties tour de schlock.

     Nothing sucks you into a film like front loading it with lots of expository background dialogue, and, man, do you get a whole bunch here. Kimo (Gregg Palmer) is tied to the ground, about to be sacrificed as punishment for the death of his father, the former chief of the tribe. He is accused of allowing his father to die from American "devil dust", radiation poisoning from a nuclear bomb accidentally dropped nearby due to a typhoon throwing off calculations. In actuality the chief was poisoned as part of a conspiracy between Kimo's brother, Tano (Robert Swan), the new chief Maranka (Baynes Barron), and Kimo's wife, Korey,  played by Suzanne Ridgeway, who had perhaps the greatest run of uncredited roles ever, including appearances in "Citizen Kane", "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Gone With the Wind". The tribe seems mostly populated by guy's who look like Teamsters. These exotic natives must hail from the forbidden jungles of Paramus, NJ. Kimo is eventually sacrificed by a knife through the heart, but not before vowing, "I promise you all. I shall come back from hell, and make you pay for your crimes."

     Dr. Bill Arnold (Tod Andrews) and the booze swilling, toothy, brillcremed and bekerchiefed Prof. Clark (John McNamara)  are living nearby in the jungle as part of an effort to clean up and study the effects of the wrongly dropped nuke. Their horny, middle aged, widowed neighbor, Mrs. Kilgore (Linda Watkins), ends up at their place after spying on the sacrifice and being chased by a tribesman. She speaks with an unidentifiably loose accent best described as "Cocknailian". Only in the picture as some sort of an attempt at humor, she's a completely unnecessary and extraneous character who disappears for most of the movie only to return for the end.

     Mrs. Kilgore is an awkward, clunky element in a screenplay made up of almost nothing but. There's a weird abundance of expository detail given throughout the whole film that serves no purpose, including the parentage and backstory of the servant girl, Orchid (Grace Mathews). Everything about the writing feels like a first draft, including the need for a thesaurus. In a couple scenes there's a jarring repetition of word's, and it's the first time a movie has made me actively aware of it's limited vocabulary.

     In order to maintain a thematic cohesiveness, the entire cast deliver performances as wooden as the monster who is an actual tree. When combined with the entertainingly awful dialogue ("Sometimes, I could kick her beautiful teeth in.") they have to deliver, to which they add pauses and cadences filed with about as much rhythm as an Ornette Coleman record, what we get is a nonstop parade of gloriously awkward exchanges. When Dr. Bill romances Dr. Mason (Tina Carver), specialist "in dermatology, and the removal of excess scar tissue", during an extended flute scored sequence, he drops this line on her, "I'm gonna fill your head every morning with jungle flower's." Huh? What? His ham handed wooing comes to a close with the perverse and hilarious reveal that they've been next to the tribal burial ground the whole time. It's an awesome moment, too effective to be accidental, and the part of the movie where you see the editorial mind of Milner taking full advantage of the power of juxtaposition.

     They discover a stump growing out of Kimo's grave, which eventually grows a face (the stump, not the grave). What follows are scenes of psychotronic perfection as the team investigates the growth, checking it's heartbeat with a stethoscope and- in what must be the sole instance of this in cinema- giving the tree an IV in an attempt to save it after digging it up.

     The creature- called "Tabonga"- escapes the laboratory and makes his grand entrance during a fight between Kory and the chief's new lady, Naomi (Tani Marsh). It's an all out, knock down, drag out wrasslin' match that would make the Fabulous Moolah proud. Tabonga looks like a Tree Ent from LOTR if Peter Jackson had made those film's in his backyard when he was 12 (I kinda wish he had). Basically, it's a guy stomping around slowly in a big, blank eyed rubber suit trying not to fall down or bump into anything. He grabs Kory and tosses her into the nearby quicksand, thereby winning this movie the tree monster, catfight, quicksand Triple Crown as well as being the best moment in cinema I've seen all month (granted, we're only a week in). His two timing old lady taken care of, Tabonga heads to the village to wreak his undead, arboreal vengeance on the others who betrayed him.

     With it's combination of bad acting, awesome theremin laced score, awful dialogue, atom age science, silly rubber suit monster, restless island natives, girl on girl violence and quicksand, "From Hell It Came" is the Platonic ideal of a fifties B-movie. Pictures like this transcend "good" or "bad" and need to be appreciated as utterly unpretentious fun. If entertainment is the most important goal of cinema, then guys like Dan Milner and other filmmakers from the midnight country of the Late, Late Movie are auteur's of the highest order.