"I'm a scientist, Ranger Brad. I don't believe in anything."
Having seen this wonderfully campy film several years ago, I mentioned to my friend and fellow author, Ted Rypel, that I wanted to see it again. So he bought me a copy and had it sent to me. This is a highly-enjoyable film, a nostalgic romp back in time for those of us who grew up on films like this -- except those films were unintentionally funny. This film has every intention of making you laugh and smile. Larry Blamire's silly and brilliantly funny spoof of those old, black-and-white sci-fi films of the 1950s and early 1960s is even better the second time around. Two scientists, one more dim-witted than the other, are searching for a meteor that contains the most valuable "mineral" in the universe: atmospherium. Professor Armstrong, one of the scientists played by Larry Blamire himself, does "science things." His wife is the perfect 1950s housewife, and not too bright herself. "I know it's hard being a scientist's wife, being the wife of scientist," he tells her at one point. The aliens from the planet Mavra are also in need of the atmospherium to repair their damaged spaceship, which looks as if it was made by a 10 year-old kid out of tin foil and an empty paper towel role. Both aliens are as dumb and as strange as you can get, and they drink cherry wine out of candle holders! One scientist uses the aliens' caulk-gun gizmo to turn four forest creatures into a sexy but very bizarre human woman who likes to dance to rock and roll music. The mutant is the funniest looking and most hilariously conceived creature since those old Italian "pepla" films. The lost skeleton itself is held together by wires and manipulated with strings that are all too clearly visible. He's a wise-cracking skeleton straight out of vaudeville. Every time the skeleton appeared on screen I kept expecting him to use that old Three Stooges' gag: "Greetings, gents! My name is Red!" But Blamire is too clever a filmmaker to borrow a bit from another source. With quotable dialogue that is far from cliched and you won't see coming, with the cheesiest special FX since Ed Wood picked up a camera, with a silliness that is highly contagious, and with cinematography that captures to perfection those classic B and C movies, this one is in a class of its own. Great cast headed, too, who surely had a ball making this film.
If you loved "Young Frankenstein," you're really gonna love "The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra."
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