Holiday Buying Guide 2008

H bombs and the Cold War sparked a duck-and-cover mentality in low-budget horror films of the Eisenhower Era: giant spiders (Tarantula) and garden pests (The Deadly Mantis), shriveled humans (The Incredible Shrinking Man) and subterranean humanoids (The Mole People), dinosaurs (The Land Unknown) and alien killer rocks (The Monolith Monsters), plus a Neanderthal fish-man (Monster on the Campus), a snake woman (Cult of the Cobra) and The Leech Woman. Except for Dr. Cyclops, a 1940 tiny-people thriller from King Kong codirector Ernest Schoedsack, the items in this deca-pack are mid-'50s Universal B pictures supervised by William Alland. He came to Hollywood with Orson Welles' Mercury players (he was the reporter in Citizen Kane), then found a niche producing superior science fiction on a shoestring, from It Came from Outer Space to Creature from the Black Lagoon and the entertaining schlock represented here. An ideal complement to the Mystery Science Theater box set, this one gives you the cheesy movies without the robot riffs. Tarantula and Shrinking Man are the best of the bunch, but playing any of these 70-minute essays in Atom Age paranoia is like being time-machined back to a midcentury Saturday matinee, tickets 25 cents, popcorn for a dime.

—Richard Corliss

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