Summer Camp...Gone DEADLY!
The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra

You’ve seen them all. Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Ed Wood and the original Ed Wood movies.You might have even seen Invasion of the Star Creatures, made back in an era when these campy movies were actually made. But where are the bad 1950’s movies coming from today, in the 21st Century?

From Larry Blamire, a guy who made a deliberately cheap and campy takeoff of every low-budget movie you’ve ever seen. As usually happens in a lot of small features, he wrote, directed, and stars as Dr. Paul Armstrong. With his wife Betty (Fay Masterson) he drives around an anonymous mountain range, searching for a meteor containing the most valuable substance known to science, Atmospherium. He goes about proclaiming the cause of “Science!” while trying to look as Republican as he can. Betty simply nods.

They run into three other major cliches. Dr. Roger Fleming is in the same area, looking for The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. He finds it...and the Skeleton, who sounds domineering until he suddenly says “I sleep now!” and goes limp. To come “alive,”the Skeleton needs...Atmospherium. They also run into two aliens, Krobar (Andrew Parks) and Lattis (Susan McConnell), who are stranded on Earth because their rocket ship needs...that’s right...Atmospherium. The final cliche is a sleek, sexy girl named Animala (Jennifer Blaire), who was created from several forest animals mutated by the alien’s ray gun.

Well, that’s about all the cliches they could afford for the film. Well, there is the alien’s pet monster (Darrin Reed), the classic Man In A Rubber Suit. That must have been the budget-buster.

So, how good is it? If you were in the cast or crew, you’ll probably love it. They seemed to have a lot of fun making it. They included “giveaway items” in the DVD extras, showing off 50’s style games, cereal boxes and toys all based on the movie. They also included a lot of outtakes, where they couldn’t stop from breaking up at the stupid things they had to say and do.

And, if you ever made a movie like this - like those guys who continually film their own Doctor Who movies in the halls of conventions - you may like it too. They had enough money to take their eduted videotape and run it through the “Filmlook” process to make it look like it was actually shot on movie film. (A lot of “filmed” sitcoms are done the same way these days.) The genuine cheapness of the production - including the incompetent puppeteering of the Lost Skeleton - may give you ideas for your own movie.

For the rest of us, though...why watch artificial camp when real camp is so readily available? Anyone with a copy of Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film can find a thousand movies like this, except they are more entertaining. Because, after all, the original bad movie makers were earnest about their camp, while Blamire and his company are simply mocking what their forbearers did.

Undoubtedly, Blalire read Weldon’s book. And he loves the silliness of these movies. Enjoy that silliness yourself...once. Rent this DVD. Watch it once. Then return it to the shelf and forget about it. You can always look up a far more entertaining and expensive version of this film, called Lobster Man from Mars, with some actors you may have actually heard of - Tony Curtis, Tommy Sledge and Philip Proctor. Which is also a one-time view.

TV engineer Thomas E. Reed discovered something curious about Lobster Man from Mars. The film project was written and shelved for ten years, until one of the writing partners died. His partner saw the movie through so his dead buddy would finally get a screen credit. See the information on the IMDB comment page for Lobster Man, on http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097768/usercomments - then talk to Tom at http://www.off-model.com.