This is a bad movie. A bad, bad, very bad, awful, barely coherent waste of 70 minutes. The good news is, for we gluttons of substandard cinema, this flick is in the public domain, so it won’t cost anything to rent. Just head over to archive.org, and there it is, ready to ruin one’s evening for free.
From screenwriter John W. Steiner, and directed by shitty movie auteur Jerry Warren, The Incredible Petrified World tells the story of four intrepid explorers walking around in a cave. That’s about it. Oh, important plot point: the cave is at the bottom of the ocean. And that is it. Oh, wait, there’s also a guy in the cave, wearing, perhaps, the most hilarious wig and fake beard ever seen in film. And that, really, is it.
John Carradine plays Millard Wyman, an inventor who has convinced four souls to descend to the ocean floor in his experimental diving bell. Wyman won’t be joining them, because by 1959, when this flick was released, Carradine was already finished with roles that took effort. The four suckers he tricks into risking their lives for his glory are Craig Randall (Robert Clarke), Dale Marshall (Phyllis Coates), Paul Whitmore (Allen Windsor), and Lauri Talbott (Sheila Noonan). Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: The Incredible Petrified World”
By 1974, gothic horror films were falling out of fashion. The year saw the last gasps from the major franchises of Hammer Film Productions, with the releases of Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. The genre had come a long way, but by the time this film, The House of the Seven Corpses, was released, seriously bloody slasher horror was making its presence felt. If a filmmaker was going to do gothic horror, it needed to have a twist.