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Viking Women And The Sea Serpent
[Lions Gate]
1957; b&w
Directed by Roger Corman
Starring: Abby Dalton, Susan Cabot, Brad Jackson, June Kenney & Richard Devon
Teenage Caveman
[Lions Gate]
1958; b&w
Directed by Roger Corman
Starring: Robert Vaughn, Darrah Marshall & Leslie Bradley
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First up in this pair of low budget Corman quickies from the late '50s is Viking Women And The Sea Serpent, whose full theatrical title was the ridiculously drawn-out "The Saga Of The Viking Women And Their Voyage To The Waters Of The Great Sea Serpent." (Which gives up half the plot!) The action in this one takes place in one of those mythical Viking lands, which mysteriously looks a lot like one of the canyons in L.A.'s Griffith Park. The aforementioned Viking women have been waiting three years for their men to return home from sea, and are getting worried they might never see them again, so they decide to hit the waves to try and find them. Soon after, they set out in what might be the cheapest looking "ship" ever. Then they encounter "the vortex," a giant whirlpool guarded by the sea serpent in the title. (I hope it was more convincing on a drive-in screen 50 years ago, as opposed to my TV, because from some angles, this "sea serpent" looks like a hand puppet in a bathtub.) Everyone is thrown overboard and they wash ashore on some foreign beach (Laguna? Malibu?) where they're immediately taken prisoner by the local tribe, the Grimolts. Through a series of coincidences the women find out their men are being used as slaves in the nearby mines and they set out to hatch plan to free them and escape back to their Viking homeland. Along the way we get a pretty good subplot involving Susan Cabot (best known to Corman fans as "The Wasp Woman"), who's the only brunette in a sea of blondes. Which, of course, means she's evil. She's got her eyes on another girl's man, but after he rejects her she tries to get the leader of their Grimolts to kill them both. Then she has a change of heart as the pair are being burned at the stake and calls on the Viking gods for help—and they respond. This freaks out the Grimolts, who panic, thus giving the Vikes their opportunity to escape. The now-repentant Cabot ensures their safe flight by sacrificing herself to delay the tribe, and everyone else heads back to sea for a final encounter with the "serpent". In about as action-packed an ending as you can get with terrible rear-screen projection and threadbare production values, the monster ends up with a sword between it's eyes in a shot that looks more like a cocktail toothpick stuck in a the aforementioned hand puppet (or maybe a dinner roll) than anything else. Then the serpent takes out all the Grimolts and dies, leaving the Vikings free to return home. Despite it's woeful acting and many other technical inadequacies I still got a goofy kick out of this one.
The original title of the second feature, "Prehistoric World," was changed by AIP to cash in on the I Was a Teenage… craze at the time. Teenage Caveman, as it came to be known, stars a "young" (although he looks 30) Robert Vaughn - AKA Napoleon Solo from "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." - in the title role. Replete with wooden dialogue interspersed with an almost existential level of questions and answers, Vaughn's character, the Symbolmaker's Son, continuously challenges "the word" and "the law" his clan of cavepeople live by. He's puzzled by the laws that forbid anyone from treading across the river or into the "burning plain," under penalty of death. Plus he wonders why "the thing that kills with it's touch" is so feared since no one has actually ever seen it. Eventually his line of thinking not only sets into motion a series of events that change the way the clan thinks and acts, it eventually shakes their faith to it's very core. That's just about all the plot I'm willing to give up here because Corman actually managed to make a quality sci-fi flick with a truly Twilight Zone-like twist at the end that I definitely did NOT see coming. Yeah, it's cheap (the entire thing was shot in two days and the acting is pretty atrocious) but that swerve separates it from the pack and makes it wholly memorable.
—the Kommandant
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