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Last year, legendary filmmaker John Carpenter teamed up with Shout! Factory to host a kaiju movie marathon called Masters of Monsters, which consisted of the original Godzilla film, Rodan; Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster, and The War of the Gargantuas. That marathon was re-run earlier this month. Now the folks at Far Out magazine have dug up a 1996 article from Film Comment magazine in which Carpenter named The War of the Gargantuas as “the ultimate Japanese monster movie” – and included it on a list of his seventeen favorite “guilty pleasure” movies. It’s a fun list, so we have it included below, with thanks to this site.

Carpenter started out the Film Comment guilty pleasures article by saying, “I wasn’t raised a Catholic, so guilt never played much of a role in my life. We Methodists don’t worry about guilt all that much. In terms of cinema, however, guilt has always been very important.

Yes, sometimes a producer could earn ‘auteur’ status making B pictures. A name that’s never going to be uttered in the same breath as Val Lewton is Sam Katzman, who for the 1950s settled into a profitable tenure making Columbia program pictures. They pretty much stayed in the category of ‘obvious junk’ yet include a number of endearing favorites. And Katzman deserved to slip through the pearly gates just for helping get Ray Harryhausen’s feature career into motion. Besides their minimal production outlay, Katzman’s horror/sci fi attractions have one strange thing in common: they don’t carry Columbia torch Lady logos. Part One of this review takes on two of the four features in Arrow’s gorgeously appointed boxed set; reviewer Charlie Largent will follow with a review of the second pair of creature features.

Cold War Creatures: Four Films from Sam Katzman

Part 1: Zombies of Mora Tau...

Man Without a Star

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1955/ 2.00:1 / 89 min.

Starring Kirk Douglas, William Campbell, Jeanne Crain, Claire Trevor

Cinematography by Russell Metty

Directed by King Vidor

King Vidor, the director behind the bucolic Kansas sequences in The Wizard of Oz and the histrionics of Duel in the Sun, has it both ways in 1955’s Man Without a Star starring Kirk Douglas.

Douglas follows his director’s lead – acting primarily with his teeth, the eager to please ham gives a performance almost as broad as his wayward sailor in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But as screenwriter Borden Chase slowly pulls back the masks on his characters, Douglas settles into a more reasonable approximation of a human being.

Closing in on 40, the irrepressible show-off plays a wandering cowpoke named Dempsey Rae who follows constellations for clues to his destiny and so far he’s come up empty – the “man without a star.

Back we go the golden age of the drive-in, or at least what many see as the ideal time freeze of a continent; family values, mom and dad and the kids loading into the car for a wholesome night under the sky. But the most popular films on the outdoor screen were the horror movies, and those were hitting their very own genre idealism with Atomic Horror, led off by 1954’s Them!, which brought giant ants from their hills to Hollywood’s with resounding success. It was open season on gargantuan critters after that, and first out of the gate was Tarantula! (1955), melding together a larger than life spider with some mad scientist action to create a unique and fun addition to the canon.

As a matter of fact, Tarantula! stands as one of the best B’s from the era; solid performances and pretty damn great special effects help...

A plug for commercial exterminators everywhere, William Alland’s titanic hairy spider provided plenty of chills for 1950s drive-ins, delivering exactly the naïve monster thrills teenagers craved. John Agar and Mara Corday do what they can with the clunker script and Jack Arnold’s direction, while Leo G. Carroll saves face by retreating below a rubber mask that makes him look like Droopy Dog. But for fans that like their monsters as big as the Great Outdoors, Clifford Stine and David Horsley’s startling special effects provide a spider-verse of sensational, surreal insect fear.

Tarantula

Blu-ray

Scream Factory

1955 / B&W / 1:75 widescreen / 80 min. / Street Date April, 2019 / 29,99

Starring: John Agar, Mara Corday, Leo G. Carroll, Nestor Paiva, Ross Elliott, Edwin Rand, Raymond Bailey, Hank Patterson.

Cinematography: George Robinson

Special Optical Effects and Cinematography: Clifford Stine, David S. Horsley

Original Music: Herman Stein, Henry Mancini

Written by Jack Arnold, Robert M. Fresco,...

The worst nightmare for people with arachnophobia, there's a "crawling terror 100 feet high" on the loose in Tarantula, and ahead of the film's Blu-ray debut on April 30th from Scream Factory, we've been provided with the full list of special features for the 1955 creature feature.

Press Release: Los Angeles, CA – Giant spider strikes! Scream Factory proudly presents the ‘50s horror classic Tarantula on Blu-ray for the first time on April 30th, 2019. This release comes packed with bonus features such as a new 2K scan of the original film elements and new audio commentary. Fans can preorder the film now at shoutfactory.com.

Biochemist Gerald Deemer has a plan to feed the world by using a special growth formula on plants and animals. Instead he creates terror beyond imagining when his work spawns a spider of mammoth proportions!

Feeding on cattle and humans, this towering tarantula has the people of Desert Rock,...

Jane Russell heats up an Arizona mining town but she’s just trying to help her new husband with his ethnic identity issues, Jeff Chandler. Superb color cinematography (forget the B&W photos here) and beautiful desert locations help, but the real appeal is seeing Russell and gorgeous co-star Mara Corday in all their glory.

Foxfire

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1955 / Color / 2:00 widescreen / 92 min. / Street Date , 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Jane Russell, Jeff Chandler, Dan Duryea, Mara Corday, Barton MacLane, Frieda Inescort, Celia Lovsky, Eddy Waller, Robert F. Simon, Charlotte Wynters, Robert Bice, Arthur Space, Beulah Archuletta, Dabbs Greer, Grace Lenard, Vici Raaf.

Cinematography: William Daniels

Film Editor: Ted. J. Kent

Original Music: Frank Skinner

Written by Ketti Frings, from the novel by Anya Seton

Produced by Aaron Rosenberg

Directed by Joseph Pevney

A medium-wattage relationship soap, Foxfire is an Eisenhower-era blueprint for consensus attitudes about race and class...

With 2018 coming to an end, Scream Factory is giving horror fans plenty of titles to get excited about in 2019 with a bunch of new Blu-ray announcements for March, including 1955's Tarantula, Man's Best Friend (1993), 1966's The Witches (starring Joan Fontaine), and more!

From Scream Factory: "We’re being attacked by giant insects next Spring as the 1950s cult favorites Tarantula and The Deadly Mantis both scuttle to Blu-ray on March 19th!

Tarantula (1955) – Biochemist Gerald Deemer has a plan to feed the world by using a growth formula on plants and animals. Instead he creates terror beyond imagining when his work spawns a spider of mammoth proportions! Feeding on cattle and humans, this towering tarantula has the people of Desert Rock, Arizona running for their lives. Can this horrifying creature be stopped or will the world succumb to its giant claws? This classic sci-fi film from director Jack Arnold stars John Agar...

Wow! Prime stop-motion animation from the heyday of monstrous science fiction, in a new restoration that puts a brilliant shine on those creepy crawly critters. Richard Denning fights giant arachnids while Mara (swoon) Corday frets and wrings her hands, waiting for the next kissing scene. The new scan clears up a lot of flaws, and gives us a much better look at the Lost Art of stop-motion magic.

The Black Scorpion

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1957 / B&W / 1:78 widescreen / 88 min. / Street Date March 20, 2018 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring Richard Denning, Mara Corday, Carlos Rivas, Mario Navarro, Carlos Múzquiz, Pascual García Peña

Cinematography Lionel Lindon

Special Effects Willis H. O’Brien, Pete Peterson

Art Direction Edward Fitzgerald

Film Editor Richard L. Van Enger

Original Music Paul Sawtell

Written by Robert Blees, David Duncan and Paul Yawitz

Produced by Jack Dietz, Frank Melford

Directed by Edward Ludwig

The ’50s big-bug monster show...

The title “Scream Queen” became popular in the late 70′s & is still popular today. But in actuality they’ve been around since the fifties, they just weren’t given the title of “Scream Queen”. Beverly Garland (The Alligator People), Mara Corday (Tarantula) & Yvette Vickers (Attack Of The Killer Leeches) are perfect examples of actresses who became very familiar to moviegoers in the fifties & sixties who frequented horror/sci-fi films. The tradition continued through the sixties (Barbara Steele) & seventies (Caroline Munro, Jamie Lee Curtis). But the eighties was the decade that the title “Scream Queen” became very well known & … More...