Thursday, October 5, 2017

A Quick Look: INVASION OF THE ANIMAL PEOPLE (1962)


   One of Jerry Warren's most successful releases was INVASION OF THE ANIMAL PEOPLE. In 1959, Sweden produced a moody science fiction/monster movie titled TERROR IN THE MIDNIGHT SUN. Since it was filmed in English, you'd think Warren would've simply imported the film and trimmed it's one tiny nude scene before release. But no, for whatever reason Jerry subjected TERROR IN THE MIDNIGHT SUN to his usual import treatment. Scenes were removed, added, swapped around, and completely re-structured. A pretty decent tale of an escaped space creature roaming Sweden was reduced to an incomprehensible mess -albeit a very financially successful mess. The one upshot was that John Carradine was added to the cast when it became INVASION OF THE ANIMAL PEOPLE (which is, obviously, a great title -even if it has absolutely nothing to do with the film itself). The film played double bill with Warren's jungle movie TERROR OF THE BLOODHUNTERS, which starred Robert Clarke. Warren obviously liked to work with Clarke and Carradine. I remember little of the co-feature, aside from the fact that it was one of Jerry's 'real' movies -built around copious amounts of jungle native stock footage. TERROR IN THE MIDNIGHT SUN and INVASION OF THE ANIMAL PEOPLE have been collected together on a very nice double-feature disk from Something Weird Video. It's worth hunting down if you like 50's monster movies and would like to see one that didn't get a lot of attention in it's original form.

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