Larry Blamire understands.
There is a deep and ineffable pleasure to be had from really, really bad movies of a bygone era. There is a reason people like Edward D. Wood, Jr., Phil Tucker, Bert I. Gordon, Larry Buchanan, and Coleman Francis are still known and celebrated by deep-cut cineastes to this very day. Their movies are more than just bad. They’re… odd. There is a fascinating, near-psychological appeal to watching a film that is unbearably incompetent. You reach a point where you’re no longer watching the movie, but peering directly into the mind of the filmmaker. How, you begin to ask yourself, how could anyone think that this movie could be good? In what parallel universe is something like Robot Monster, The Beast of Yucca Flats, or Cat-Women on the Moon actually be considered entertainment?
Ten years ago today, B-movie aficionado Larry Blamire released one of the ultimate trash movie spoofs The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra in theaters. Legitimate underground cult films seem rare these days (The Room notwithstanding), but Lost Skeleton most certainly counts. It was pretty well-reviewed at the time, and is still well-loved by the oddball audiences who happen to be on Blamire’s wavelength; that is: people who can find that odd, comforting psychological balance inside Z-grade monster films of the 1950s.
“Betty, you know what this meteor could mean for science.
If we find it, and it’s real, it could mean a lot. It could mean actual advances in the field of science.”
The story of The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is deliberately unknowable. It involves a scientist (Blamire) looking for a meteor with his Connie Dobbs-ish wife (Fay Masterson). It involves a madman (Brian Howe) who is hellbent on resurrecting the titular skeleton, and also making an animal-woman slave (Jennifer Blaire). It involves a pair of aliens (Andrew Parks and Susan McConnell) looking for a rare element called atmospherium. And there is a mutant creature (Darrin Reed) for good measure.
This is a broad slapstick sendup of the highest order. The bad dialogue, the cheap special effects, the Topanga Canyon locations, the cleverly inserted continuity errors, all are spot-on enhancements of well-worn and stultifying sci-fi movie tropes that have somehow leaked into our collective unconsciousness. You may not have seen Bride of the Monster or Terror in the Midnight Sun, but you somehow know the groundwork they laid, the tropes they established, the crap they perpetuated. Maybe you stayed up late to watch “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” Maybe you’re only familiar with generations of satire. But The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra taps into something all film fans inherently just know. Knowledge of bad B-movies is something some of us just seem to be born with.
“Aliens? Us? Is this one of your Earth jokes?”
Blamire also knows exactly how a spoof should work: It should be a sendup of something worth mocking, but it should also be an affectionate jibe. The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra has no trouble mocking the awful movies of a past generation (indeed, some of the dialogue in Lost Skeleton is cribbed directly from Plan 9 from Outer Space), but you can tell that Blamire also has a deep love of those movies. He has watched the works of Wood, of Francis, of Corman, and become something of an unofficial scholar. This is a man who has clearly fallen in love with Phil Tucker’s 1953 classic Robot Monster, as so many of us have. Robot Monster is, if you’ll recall, an unexpectedly dreamlike monster film about a gorilla in a diving helmet (actually Ro-Man, the robot monster) who finds himself unable to murder the few remaining humans on a future Earth, as he feels he wants to live more like them. The monster, the locations, the sideways approach to human speech. These are all echoed directly in Lost Skeleton. In short, Lost Skeleton works because it’s a spoof of a B-movie that can work as a B-movie unto itself.
“The only person I want in that pretty little head of yours is me.”
But, more than that, Blamire seems to understand the idiosyncratic loneliness that some of these B-movies express. Awful monster movies are, you’ll often find, incredibly intimate. Some movies are so bad, they can only be the result of a single fevered auteur, working hard to bring his twisted version of the world to the screen. Something like Robot Monster says less about the state of sci-fi cinema, and more about the inner workings of director Phil Tucker’s mind. He reveals, in Robot Monster, a kind of deep loneliness, a longing to connect. Perhaps, Tucker must have thought, there is someone out there who understands Ro-Man, and can, by extension, understand me. Perhaps there is someone who will finally get me. And the saddest part of these lonely filmmakers and their mad quest to find connection is that their movies are unwatchable. Ed Wood has an undying enthusiasm for his own movies, and he thought they were just the bee’s knees. They were a peek into what he found interesting. And yet, they are uniformly awful and incompetent movies.
“You think the Earth people think we are strange, you think?
It is strange the way different people on different planets differ.”
Pathos. It’s about the pathos we all secretly share. We all have our quirks, our little idiosyncrasies, our little personality flaws that others may not understand. But we tend to keep those hidden in our day-to-day lives. B-movie filmmakers have had the desperation and the resources and the insane gumption to actually express their quirks through their art. That their movies fail shows how alone they really are. Most people tend to scoff at their failed attempts at entertainment – we’ve all laughed openly at a bad movie. But some of us are sensitive to the pathos involved. The courage it took to bare one’s soul so openly through a piece of garbage like Robot Monster.
“Even as a child, I was hated by skeletons!”
Blamire is too self-aware in Lost Skeleton to be expressing any of his own pathos – this is a spoof and an homage after all – but he clearly has felt the pathos of B-movie luminaries reaching out to him, trying to touch him, trying so very hard to connect, and failing through a mere lack of talent. He understands. He knows why B-movies get made, and he knows why certain people make them.
But, more than anything, he has an ear for the way B-movies operate. He knows the details perfectly. He knows the costumes and the music (indeed, the music in the film is taken from an old public domain archive, giving the entire film a ring of authenticity). Blamire gets it. The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is a fine comedy, but it’s also a key to unlocking baffling auteurs who work with garbage.
Happy anniversary, you crazy skeleton. Continue to work your magic.
Witney Seibold is the head film critic for Nerdist, and a contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly articles Trolling, Free Film School and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
