The Incredible Petrified World (1959) - Descend into the movie world of Jerry Warren

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Several natural sensations and a buxom blond in the grasp of a giant octopus are teased on this poster for Jerry Warren's The Incredible Petrified World

A team of four descend into the sea in a diving bell, but when the wire snaps they manage to rescue themselves into an enormous underwater cave, where they fall upon a kind of caveman, who thinks they will never escape!

The Incredible Petrified World is written by John W. Steiner and produced and directed by Jerry Warren (Man Beast (1956)).

John Carradine (House of Dracula (1945)) is the engineer behind the catastrophic underwater mishap, but his character immediately gives up, which is very inauspicious as far as our sympathy for his character goes. Lighting, sound and image quality stinks here. The opening has a fascinating (archive footage) octopus/shark fight, and the idea of the lost underwater world is pure adventure and exciting. But the acting and dialog is also lame here. In the end everyone become friends again. The Incredible Petrified World is a bizarre trip to the ultra-low budget world of Jerry Warren.

 

Watch a trailer for the film here

 

Cost: Unknown

Box office: Unknown

= Uncertain

[The Incredible Petrified World was released 12 November (South Carolina) and runs 67 minutes. Carradine was paid 100 $ a week for his performance. Phyllis Coates (Cattle Empire (1958)) was reportedly persuaded by ex-boyfriend Warren to be the film's main female star with a promise that the film would not be released in California. Coates was never paid for her performance, and the film was released in California, where it seriously damaged her acting career. Shooting took place around March 1957 in New Mexico, Arizona and California. The 'monsters' teased on the film's poster are not to be found in the film, as the monster suit Warren had made was deemed too bad by even him and was thrown away during production. The film went unreleased for more than 2½ years, before Warren released it in South Carolina, then North Carolina, and then wider, on a double bill with his Teenage Zombies (1959). Internationally, the film is only listed as having had a release in Argentina in 1962. Cost and gross details are regrettably not to be found. The film is now in public domain and can be seen and downloaded free and legally right here. Warren returned with Teenage Zombies. Carradine returned in 5 TV credits prior to his theatrical return in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1960). 1.3k+ IMDb users have given The Incredible Petrified World a 3.1/10 average rating.]

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The Night of the Sunflowers/La Noche de los Girasoles (2006) - Countryside crime drama investigates humanity's unflattering sides

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Darkness envelopes two characters on this uninformative poster for Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo's The Night of the Sunflowers

A rapist and murderer of women is loose in a rural area of Castilly y Leon, Spain, when an outsider cave scientist arrives there with his beautiful girlfriend to to explore a newly discovered grotto.

 

The Night of the Sunflowers is written and directed by debuting Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo (Mustek (1997, short)). The title is a literal translation of the original Spanish title.

The film starts promising and shows a grueling rape crime in real-time. - We are boarded on The Night of the Sunflowers, as it turns out to be chronologically sophisticated. But its thriller promise is soon abandoned by Sánchez-Cabezudo in favor of a feel-bad crime drama, which reaches new heights in the depressing content variety. - Not least because all of the developments seem realistically enough.

SPOILER The scientist's crew soon strike down the wrong villager as revenge, and a local cop talks them into cutting up and disappearing the body. - But the deceased man's father-in-law, who is also the local police chief, finds them out, takes a bribe and informs everyone that he never wants to hear talk of the incident. Meanwhile the real criminal returns home to his wife and TV on the couch.

The Night of the Sunflowers is a study in humanity's willingness to sweep even truly horrific crimes under the rug, and about crimes' tendency to spur new crimes, and about the amoral in man. It is well-made but extremely depressing.

Sánchez-Cabezudo talks about the film in a 6-minute clip here

 

Cost: Unknown
Box office: 1.6 mil. $

= Uncertain but likely a mega-flop (projected return of 0.45 times the cost)

[The Night of the Sunflowers was released 25 August (Spain) and runs 123 minutes. The film did not have a North-American release, (though it was screened at Cleveland International Film Festival). Its 3 biggest markets were Spain with 1.1 mil. $ (68.8 % of the total gross), the UK with 120k $ (7.5 %) and France with 114k $ (7.1 %). If made on a low budget of 3.5 mil. $, the film would rank as a mega-flop. The film was nominated for 3 Goya awards, among other honors. Sánchez-Cabezudo has not returned with a feature since but instead turned to writing and directing for TV. 2.8k+ IMDb users have given The Night of the Sunflowers a 7.1/10 average rating.]

 

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Eegah/Eegah! The Name Written in Blood (1962) - Wehling, Hall, Sr. and son's landmark turkey

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This lurid, sensationalistic poster for Arch Hall, Sr.'s Eegah promises much much more than the film delivers

A girl in a car in the desert lives through a giant caveman jumping out of the darkness. She and her father are later kidnapped by the very same mysterious stranger, known as Eegah.

Already from the incredibly ugly, often unreadable title credits it is clear that Eegah is an unusual mess. The film has flaws aplenty (the sound, angles, editing, music and acting are continually botched), - in fact the mistakes are so astoundingly numerous that the film hardly has a single shot that is acceptably well done.
To this must be added the comical ineptness of the script (by Bob Wehling (Wild Guitar (1962)), based on director-producer-co-star Arch Hall, Sr.'s (The Corpse Grinders (1971)) original story), which is ridiculous to its core: SPOILER The girl and her father in it are not worried about being trapped in a cave and having to drink sulfurous water (!) there, but actually have a jolly good time shaving the old man and then the caveman, whom the girl also continually worries about at great lengths, despite his obvious intent to rape her. - Yes, these are just some of the weird developments in Eegah.
Hall, Sr. directed his son Arch Hall, Jr. (The Sadist (1963)) here as the dimwitted doo-woop rock'n'roll singer, and Hall, Jr. not only looks a bit bizarre, (take a look below in the nifty B/W promotional material), he also lip-syncs really bad.
Eegah is one of those legendary movie turkeys that any true bad movie buff just has to see.

Watch a telling 2-minute scene from the film here

Cost: Reportedly 15k $
Box office: Unknown
= Uncertain
[Eegah premiered 17 April (in Biloxi, Mississippi!) and runs 90 minutes. It was shot in California. Its gross is unknown, and the only other country than USA that it was released in seems to have been Mexico. - But Hall, Sr. and Hall, Jr. continued to make movies, indicating that the modest budget was returned, maybe with a profit. The film since grew in notoriety and fame with screenings on the TV-shows Mystery Science Theater 3000, Movie Macabre and Exploitica and many different video releases. It has fallen into public domain and is available for download and streaming free and legally right here. The film now rests at #47 on IMDb's user-generated Bottom 100, between Final Justice (1985) and Die Hard Dracula (1998). 4,763 IMDb users have given Eegah a 2.2/10 average rating.]

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The Descent (2005) - Marshall's intensely claustrophobic cave horror

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+ Best Monster Movie of the Year + Best Gore Movie of the Year + Best British Movie of the Year

The ingenious poster for Neil Marshall's The Descent

QUICK REVIEW:

A group of adrenaline-junkie women friends meet in the smallest populated part of pure nature America, because the American in the bunch wants to take them on a wild cave exploration, which is to mark a new beginning for their friend Sarah, who lost her husband and child tragically a year before.

SPOILER Their death in a car accident is seen in a sequence in the first act, which is very impressive, although our emotional engagement in the tragedy remains absent. Once the women, - who balance among themselves in being tough, reckless and annoying, - finally descend into the cave, the film very quickly becomes extremely scary. The Descent might be the most claustrophobic film ever made.
The lightning and the entire time spent in the impressively created cave is commendable, (cinematographer Sam McCurdy (The Devil's Double (2011))), SPOILER and the cave monsters are gross. I did not care for the ambiguous ending, - but be aware that there are at least two different endings out on different versions of the film, as the US version provides closure, whereas the European one seems to have this ambiguous ending.
The Descent is written and directed by Englishman Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers (2002)), and it gets your blood pumping!

 

Related post:

 

2005 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I] 

In lieu of a trailer for the film, which isn't on Youtube at the moment, here's a video of director Marshall talking Game of Thrones, which he directed two episodes of, in 2012 and '14

Cost: 3.5 mil. £ (approximately 5.01 mil. $)
Box office: 57.1 mil. $
= Huge hit
[The Descent was shot in England and Scotland with the caves built in the Pinewood Studios outside London. The film's release in the UK was marred by the July 7 2005 Islamist bombings in London, including in its underground system, which undoubtedly cooled some audiences' desires to see a horror movie about being trapped underground for a while. The film competed with another, bigger cave-set horror film, The Cave (2005), but were able to premiere nearly two months before that film and became the hit of the two. In North America, The Descent had an 8.9 mil. $ opening weekend as #5 and grossed 26 mil. $ (45.5 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were the UK with 4.8 mil. $ (8.4 %) and France with 2.7 mil. $(4.7 %). Roger Ebert gave the film a perfect 4-star rating. The Descent Part 2 (2009) is also a (much less successful) fact. The Descent is certified fresh at 85 % with a 7.3 critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes.]

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