VCI Entertainment: Creepy Creature Double Feature Vol. 1 (1963) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of VCI Entertainment

VCI Entertainment I’m always wary of in terms of picture and/or sound quality, but in recent years they’ve been pairing with Kit Parker Films and the Mary Pickford company and those releases have generally been solid on a technical front and/or packaging.  Whereas VCI titles tend to be on the more public domain front, the Kit Parker releases are often furnished with a booklet detailing the film’s history and actually do come from 4K restored film elements.  While rare for the company to do double-feature releases, sometime in the early 2020s they did unveil a two-film DVD set entitled The Edgar Allan Poe Heart-Quaking Double Feature which included The Tell-Tale Heart and Legend of Horror.  Nothing extraordinary but bless VCI Entertainment for giving these two otherwise forgotten Poe adaptations new life of some sort in the home video world.  Circa 2026, VCI seems to be renewing the double-feature format, this time in an ongoing series called Creepy Creature Double Feature with this new disc being the first volume, including two 1963 regional psychotronic sci-fi horror baddies The Crawling Hand and The Slime People.
 
Advertised as being restored in 4K and produced in conjunction with Kit Parker Films and MVD Visual, the two-film set housed on one Blu-ray disc sort of joins the likes of, say, Criterion’s Monsters and Madmen four-film quartet of low-budget regional monster movies as a welcome dose of early sixties high camp.  Each film running just over an hour or so, both are credited as being released in 1963, are black and white and have a scrappy feel to them whose charm is infectious.  Starting with The Crawling Hand, written and directed by I Was a Teenage Frankenstein creator Herbert L. Strock, it tells the tale of an astronaut who becomes demonically possessed by an alien in space with the effect creating deep cycles under his mad eyes.  When the ship is exploded and remnants fall back to Earth, a severed arm of the astronaut ends up washing ashore on a beachfront only to be found by two teenagers romancing on the beach, Swedish girl Marta (Sirry Steffen) and science student Paul (Rod Lauren).  As scientists Steve Curan (Peter Breck the hero from Shock Corridor) and Max Weitzberg (Kent Taylor) close in trying to contain the situation, the small town where Paul lives is about to be terrorized by the severed arm not only reanimating and committing murders but it seems to possess and infect the teenage science student as well.

 
Incredible shot by Academy Award winning cinematographer Willard Van der Veer for his work on With Byrd at the South Pole and a suitable fifties band sounding score by Marlin Skiles, The Crawling Hand is pretty hokey fare with an obvious off-camera hand moving itself about in between shots of actors pretending to choke themselves with the severed reanimated arm.  The first astronaut who is possessed with blackened eye sockets indicating possession ala Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is fine but when our main character Paul played by Rod Lauren is tasked with doing the same, the hokum factor flies through the roof with emoting that feels somewhere between James Dean and Tommy Wiseau.  No matter as his Swedish girlfriend played by Sirry Steffen does okay when she isn’t strutting around near nude on the beach sequences.  The best actor of the piece is undoubtedly Peter Breck who would achieve screen infamy in Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor as a reporter infiltrating an insane asylum who, under the duress of the task, actually goes insane himself.  With his skeptical and matter of fact approach to the situation, we can very well see him diving into a madhouse head over heels.  Also showing up in the piece is Alan Hale Jr. aka Skipper from Gilligan’s Island as the town sheriff not too keen on people from Washington closing in on his tight knit community.

 
Next up is actor-director Robert Hutton’s sublimely goofy apocalyptic survival horror thrillers The Slime People, a film somewhere in between Night of the Living Dead, Humanoids from the Deep and From Hell It Came involving an alien invasion coming from the underground wreaking havoc on humanity.  With the film starting after the outbreak has hit Los Angeles with most of the survivors being murdered by spear-chucking fish-like hairy monsters in rubber costumers (reportedly $600 per suit at the time), we happen upon a small handful of survivors including a professor Galbraith (Robert Burton), his two daughters Lisa (Susan Hart) and Bonnie (Judee Morton) and a pilot Tom Gregory (director Robert Hutton) who lands his aircraft at a now mostly deserted airport.  Banding together, they encounter a lone Marine who joins forces with them to try and barricade themselves indoors against the invaders who have created some kind of mushroom-like machine which generates a perpetual fog-wall that military personnel are unable to breach.  It’s up to these survivors to try and figure out where the machine is before the last remnants of humanity are extinguished.

 
On paper, with a script vastly rewritten by producer Joseph F. Robertson’s wife Blair Robertson, there’s a decent conceptual road movie ala 28 Days Later with characters crammed into a car trying to survive the unthinkable.  On film in practice, The Slime People is every bit as silly and corny as its title suggests.  From the hulking rubber suited monsters which ate up most of the film’s budget, donning spears and behaving very tribe-like, to the cheesy borderline anti-acting by the cast members save for legendary The War of the Worlds actor Les Tremayne, you want to take The Slime People seriously but can’t bring yourself to.  It doesn’t help that the soundtrack by Lou Frohman doesn’t seem to take the proceedings all that seriously either.  Cinematography by Wiiliam Troiano is suitable albeit largely drenched in blinding fog, making it a little bit of a precursor to John Carpenter’s The Fog in some ways.  Both movies are a hoot but this one particularly ratchets up the camp factor with scenes of the daughters turning into screaming damsels in distress being carted off by professional stuntmen in rubber costumes.

 
With both movies featuring on the original MST3K series, the first volume of Creepy Creature Double Feature is a nice package for VCI Entertainment including a limited collectible slipcover and reversible sleeve art, unheard of for the boutique label.  There’s also a fair amount of special features included.  Some of it like the video featurette Rubber Monsters, Real Fears: Mid-Century Sci-Fi are pretty basic but also included is a one-hour telephone interview with actress Susan Hart from The Slime People mediated by Rob Kelly that’s highly informative.  Also included is a drive-in sci-fi poster gallery.  Again nothing spectacular but in the right mindset and mood, these can be a lot of fun for group viewings and fans of high camp from the middle of the 20^th century.  I had fun with both of these for what they were and VCI Entertainment and Kit Parker Films assembled a nice double-feature package, so stay tuned for further forthcoming volumes from the boutique label.

--Andrew Kotwicki