Three for the Show (1955)

Broadway star Betty Grable discovers she is married to two men and is thrilled, but best friend Marge Champion figures she’ll be the odd one out if she can’t stop that ego-maniacal bitch.

Jack the Giant Killer (1962)

It was a spiteful rip-off of Ray Harryhausen’s 7th Voyage of Sinbad. The stop-motion animation wizard was shopping for investors when he was turned down by producer Edward Small before the movie was funded by Columbia. Years later after Sinbad was a hit Small decided he could make his own version without Harryhausen, even going so far as to hire the same hero and villain, and the same director!

Harryhausen sued and won but the film had already bombed in theaters. To avoid a total financial loss on the television rights Small retooled the knight and sorcery fantasy as a musical, dubbing the actors voices and manipulating the film to make the actors mouths match the new lyrics!

This didn’t help the fact that the film already boasted some of the worst special effects ever shot in color: lumakeyed goblins that only shoot cartoon fire, unfinished puppetoons that sag like melting play-doh, and a hilarious cross-eyed sea monster you just wanna hug. Harryhausen it ain’t!

So what a surprise under all this camp to find such lovely photography and vivid costumes! Truly fantastic cat-eyed witches, a plush medieval castle in dense textures and tapestries, and colorful lighting that runs the gamut from storybook pictures to soft paintings.

Star Maidens (1975)

If you’re a fan of THUNDERBIRDS or SPACE:1999 then you might be curious about this obscure TV show made shortly after the Andersons’ divorced. Although she is uncredited, the hand of Sylvia Anderson is all over this ambitious but mostly haphazard production: Gogo- booted guards in day-glow crash helmets, delicious sets and props that have more in common with a Pucci gown than technology, romantic innuendos and social situations too advanced for a space-rocket adventure….

Star Maidens isn’t just a campy role-reversal. It explores what happens when worlds collide, and the ripple effect each has on the other’s culture, albeit played out in a silly melodrama with a handful of characters shot on as low-budget as possible….
…more about Star Maidens

Mask of Fu Manchu (1933)

Before Myrna Loy became society alcoholic Nora Charles of the Thin Man detective films, she was Chinese. Or well, Myrna looked kinda Chinese. At least her studio-given last name “Loy” sounded vaguely Chinese…. More than Fah Lo See (fallacy — get it??) the nympho-sadist daughter of evil mastermind Fu Manchu!

There’s nothing Chinese about Fu either, played by slithering effeminate Boris Karloff on loan from low-budget horrormill Universal. MGM was new to the horror/adventure genre, at best they were exploring — or you might say exploiting, so it might be easier to classify this racist, torturific, and subtly homoerotic fantasy as a tittlating offshoot of the musical fantasy genre. No holds barred and cue the alligator pit.

After yelping with excitement watching her beau hunk prisoner bound and whipped, Loy relaxes with an opium pipe watching her father stroke the nearly nude hero before injecting him with an orgy of spider, lizard, and snake venom that will render him an obedient but unimpaired sex slave. Yeah, it’s that good.