REPTILICUS (1961)

Men drilling for copper in Denmark run into some bloody bones and tissue (which, as we see but they don't, is slowly pulsing). The huge frozen chunk of flesh is sent to Copenhagen where it is put under close inspection by scientists who assume it is a dinosaur tail. When it is accidentally thawed out during a late-night storm, it begins re-generating, and an American army general arrives as a UN representative. At this point, the movie basically stops as the Danish folks take the (surly, obnoxious) general out for a mini-travelogue of Copenhagen, even including a stop at a nightclub for a (not-bad) song called "Tivoli Nights." During another late-night storm, the regenerated creature comes alive and escapes to terrorize the country, eating cattle and spitting a green acid slime. Will our scientific and military heroes figure out a way to stop the seemingly invulnerable beast?

This is often referred to as the worst monster movie of all time. It is pretty bad, but in a fairly entertaining way—it's a shame the MST3K crew never got around to this one. It's a Danish Godzilla movie, except instead of a man lumbering around in a monster suit stomping on a set of Tokyo, this has a gangly, fragile-looking marionette dancing about on a table-top set of Copenhagen. In the Danish version, the monster flies but the American distributor thought those scenes were laughable (though how they could have been more laughable than the scenes of the marionette dinosaur's head bobbling about is beyond me), so the green slime shots were added optically. We see animated bubbling green blobs shoot out of the monster's snout and then the green is simply wiped across the screen, obscuring the people and things it's shot on. Worse, we never see the results of the slime; they simply cut to another shot. There is one nicely-done sequence of hundreds of Danes running across a drawbridge which suddenly parts, causing a few folks (on foot and on bicycle) to go plummeting into the sea. The less said about the acting, the better, though I should bring up two points: the terrible performance of Carl Ottosen (and whoever dubbed him) as the American general, and the fact that Bent Mejding, the closest thing to a hero in the movie, looks like a less quirky David Bowie. This is pretty bad—when a nightclub song is the highlight of a monster movie, you're in trouble—but I did have fun. [DVD]