Trailers from Hell

"Howdya like to drag that one to the High School Prom?" leers a horny astronaut while ogling the shapely acolytes of Queen Yllana, leader of the all-girl Venusian population. "I hate zat qveen", grumbles Chief Scientist Zsa Zsa Gabor, who doesn't appear to be in on the joke. Silly, spoofy and cheerfully chauvinistic, this one has many fans, some of them straight.

Dick Clark produced Richard Rush's ode to the Haight-Ashbury scene, filmed on location by Laszlo Kovacs in Psychedelic Color. Remember, as Dean Stockwell tells us, "all the games gotta go, or else it's just a plastic hassle"!

Anticipating punk rock, Peter Watkins' semi-documentary study of a future society using music to enslave the masses appropriates some unauthorized reenactments from the National Film Board of Canada's groundbreaking Paul Anka docu "Lonely Boy". How Universal ended up distributing this is a mystery even they couldn't solve.

Sci-fi specialist Jack Arnold's best Western casts Audie Murphy against type -or is he?- as a cold-blooded hit man who just might be Death personified and brings fear to a town full of guilty people. An underrated gem.

Although one wag said of director Stanley Kramer's all-star Cinerama extravaganza, "it shows what happens when a man who doesn't understand drama tries to do comedy", the years have been kind to it. Nostalgia for the once-in-a-lifetime ensemble cast alone would get it by, but the extravagant stunt work that seemed so unwhimsical in 1963 is now commonplace in movie comedy.

Peter Lorre's Hollywood debut is one of the weirder pix ever to come from MGM, or maybe anywhere else. One of ace cinematographer Karl Freund's rare forays into directing, and his last. Gregg Toland photographed it, and years later Pauline Kael would claim he stole a lot of shots from this to use in Citizen Kane!

Orson Welles' most mysterious film has him playing a sinister international tycoon who, like Charles Foster Kane, is obsessed with his past, which he can't remember -- or can he? A motley assortment of the director's pals fill out the various roles, including then-wife Paola Mori.

Billy Wilder took a lotta brickbats for this "vulgar", "tasteless" and "crude" sex comedy set in Climax, Nevada, which was roundly condemned from pulpits and lecterns countrywide in 1964. Its sleazy reputation has been somewhat rehabilitated over the years as pop culture has raced to embrace such concepts as DNA hair gel and carnal relations with baked goods.

Fascinating mixture of science fiction and social comment from Hammer Films circa 1961. Rumored for a long-overdue dvd release, this bleak but moving atomic parable still packs a punch and was recently unveiled in its original cut on Turner Classic Movies over 40 years after its truncated release. With an emotion-packed score by James Bernard.

Writer Jack Nicholson and star Peter Fonda told Roger Corman he couldn't make a movie about LSD without trying it at least once. So Roger took a caravan of pals to Big Sur, where he dutifully dropped acid and communed with the elements. Out of it all came his most personal and revealing film, a pop art time capsule that was banned in Britain for nearly a decade.