BEFORE: I'm back from vacation, and WOW, what a trip. We covered 4 cities, Dallas to Little Rock to Memphis to Nashville in 8 days. My wife drove us about 700 miles in 2 rental cars (we switched cars in Little Rock, long story...) and I navigated. OK, my phone navigated, but still. I was in charge of selecting the best BBQ restaurant in each city, based on all of the BBQ-based travel shows I've watched over the years, and we really made some great selections: Stubby's BBQ in Hot Springs, AR; the Bar-B-Q Shop in Memphis (selected by Food Network as #1 spot for ribs in the country); and Peg Leg Porker in Nashville. By keeping it to one restaurant in each city, we hoped to not get burned out on barbecue (right, as if that's even possible).
Our focus was on food, but we changed it up, and only had BBQ about every other day. We also hit the last day of the Texas State Fair in Dallas, where we ate everything that was weird and deep-fried - deep-fried brisket egg rolls, deep-fried red velvet cupcake, deep-fried cream puffs, deep-fried clam chowder (yep, that's possible). Deep-fried stuffed chicken wings, deep-fried bacon, deep-fried Thanksgiving dinner balls. Oh, and I drank Oreo beer, but the less said about that, the better. Then we drove on, discovered the Waffle House and went there a few times, once in each state. To change things up even more, we ate dinner on top of a giant pyramid in Memphis, where I had venison sausage and elk chops. Also in Memphis I ate catfish for the first time, and it was fantastic. I also had some sushi in Nashville that was unlike any I'd seen before, with little egg rolls and gyoza dumplings rolled right in.
But wait, there's more - we also visited Southfork Ranch, where they filmed the exteriors for the TV show "Dallas" (my wife has seen every episode). It was a little disappointing to learn that all of the interiors were shot on a studio in L.A., so the house on the real ranch looks nothing own the inside like the one on the show, unless you count the TV movies in the 1990s. In Memphis we visited another famous house, Graceland, and took pictures of all the memorabilia stored in the neighboring museums, including many of Elvis's jumpsuits, gold records, and his many, many cars. After walking along the banks of the Mississippi River and down Beale St., and a quick visit to Sun Records, we struck out for Nashville, where we didn't have any specific agenda, so we took one of those trolley/bus tours around town to see everything. Sure, there's the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Johnny Cash museum, the Patsy Cline museum, but we didn't care about any of that. All I wanted to see was the giant full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Centennial Park, which is where the climactic concert scenes were filmed for the movie "Nashville". Done, on to the BBQ restaurant.
There was some weather drama coming back, we got an alert from Delta Airlines that we might want to reschedule our flight at no charge, because thunderstorms were expected for today. But we didn't panic, kept an eye on the weather and kept our options open. The storms apparently dissipated and turned into just regular rain, which delayed our return by only an hour, which is not bad, all things considered. Now we're back, full of barbecue and exhausted. But I can't relax, I've got to get right back into my routine to finish October's chain on time.
William Hopper (the son of Hedda Hopper, for real...) carries over from "The Deadly Mantis", and I thought this would sort of circle back around to where I started this segment of the chain, with "The Thing From Another World", but I guess it doesn't. Or if it did, I forgot how it was supposed to do that. I think this one was supposed to follow "Five Million Years to Earth", which got dropped from the chain entirely, and so I moved it to here, to be a proper thematic introduction to tomorrow's film. Just two films left in October, and then I can put all these silly horror + alien films with terrible effects behind me, and get on to more serious matters in my November and December films. Just 40 films to go in 2017, but so much more to cover...
THE PLOT: The first U.S. spaceship to Venus crash-lands off the coast of Sicily on its return trip. A dangerous lizard-like creature comes with it and quickly grows gigantic.
AFTER: Sorry, rest of the world, this one is our bad. The U.S. is totally responsible, apparently we just HAD to go to Venus and back, and our astro-nuts screwed up and just had to bring back a pet lizard with them, and now all this has to happen. Something in Earth's atmosphere really super-charged this lizard thing and made it grow all enormous (must be all the "nutrients") - see, this is why we really started polluting our air in the late 1950's, so that we humans could slowly build up a tolerance for smog and ozone, and any invading aliens wouldn't be able to handle it. Makes sense.
Our spaceship makes it back to Earth, but crashes near Sicily. Which is a little weird, I mean if the pilot could find Earth, a tiny island in the vast cosmic ocean, why couldn't he land on the right part of the planet? Unless that's EXACTLY how accurate his space travel skills are, he can get you to the planet, but that's about it - finding the right spot on the globe to land is just too difficult. (By the way, how DOES a returning astronaut know how to find the Earth? I mean, it probably moved since he left it, so it would always be in a different place...)
A little Italian boy then finds a metal capsule on the beach, and so he sells the jelly-looking stuff inside to a freelance zoologist, Dr. Leonardo, because that's what you do, so he can buy a cowboy hat. When the goop hatches into a little lizard that seems to be a new species, the doctor is amazed and then heads for the institute to show off his new discovery. But the creature starts growing, and eventually becomes too big for any cage the doctor has.
The highlight of the film is Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion animation of the creature, and the fight that it has with an elephant from the Rome Zoo. Though mixing in live-action footage of a real elephant does make the stop-motion elephant look a little fakey. They probably should have left out the real footage, because the real elephant moves very fluid and natural-like, making the animated elephant look sort of herky-jerky by comparison.
Once again, love blooms in the time of disaster - this time it's between the pilot (and sole survivor) of the space mission falling for the zoologist's granddaughter, who just HAPPENS to be the nursing student who takes care of the astronauts after the crash. She must be a terrible nurse, if only one of her charges survives...
Also starring Joan Taylor, Frank Puglia (last seen in "The Caddy"), John Zaremba, Thomas Browne Henry (last seen in "The Robe"), Jan Arvan (ditto), Tito Vuolo (last seen in "Shadow of the Thin Man"), Arthur Space (last seen in "Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in Hollywood"), Bart Braverman, with a cameo from Ray Harryhausen.
RATING: 4 out of 10 sulfur bags
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