What makes smart people with otherwise exceptional taste enjoy bad movies. I'm not talking about cheesy, but professionally made things like Ah-nold and Stallone actionfests. No, I mean really, really awful productions made by people who seemingly have no talent whatsoever at filmmaking.
Even someone as ruthlessly intelligent as Frank Zappa loves Z-Grade horror. One of his most enjoyable songs, "Cheepnis", extols the virtues of bad monster movies.
When people talk about the worst horror and SF movies from the past, titles like Plan 9 from Outer Space, Robot Monster, and Manos: The Hand of Fate tend to come up. I don't hear about Jerry Warren's abominable Man Beast often enough. It's one of the greatest ever made.
Like most California youths, Jerry Warren wanted to be in the motion picture business. As a young man he managed to land bit parts in a few decent movies. He decided to venture out on his own with a movie about the Abominable Snowman, otherwise known as a Yeti.
Warren found an old white gorilla suit used in a couple of Poverty Row productions for his titular beast. He gathered up stock footage of mountain scenes and purchased unused reels from an aborted Mexican movie. He rounded up exactly nine friends to serve as actors. Amusingly, the lead of Man Beast is attributed to one "Rock Madison", portraying a character named Lon Ranyon. In reality there was no person named Rock Madison and no character in Man Beast named Lou Ranyon. In addition to that, the screenplay credit goes to B. Arthur Cassidy. Once again, no such person existed. They cobbled together the plot and dialogue on the cuff as the crew toiled on their cinematic expedition, utilizing the footage they had and the meager abilities of the cast.
For Tibetan scenes Warren and his cast and crew climbed over a fence into a major studio lot and shot on sets previously used for a movie about Mongolia.
Man Beast is truly the stuff of legend.
Some of the mountain footage is actually pretty good. Those Mexican filmmakers had a clue or two about motion picture photography.
The Man Beast plot is as thin as the clothes the mountaineers wear on their Himalayan trek. A woman and her boyfriend set out to find her brother, who went in search of the fabled Yeti. They hire a would-be hunky guide and set off. They meet a group of scientists along the way and of course run afoul of the terrible man beast itself.
Small details bring authenticity to any movie. I love the way the explorers do not even wear gloves. Even when they are sitting in piles of fake snow. One guy wears a fedora adorned with a feather.
The story moves as slowly as a trek up a snowy mountain, but Man Beast growls into high gear when the Yeti begins to trail them up the peak. It's a ridiculous monster that inspires laughs, but maybe unsophisticated audiences were scared back in the mid-50s.
Man Beast dips into more transgressive territory than most movies of its time when it is revealed that the snowmen want to kidnap women to mate with in order to advance their race. This got Warren in a little trouble with British censors, who requires a couple of minutes snipped from the movie for release there.
While the movie didn't exactly set the box office on fire, Man Beast was successful enough for Jerry Warren to have a career in low budget filmmaking. He went on to direct Teenage Zombies, The Incredible Petrified World, Face of the Screaming Werewolf, and the legendary The Wild World of Batwoman. His tactic of incorporating previous footage of foreign movies picked up on the cheap worked well in Man Beast. He continued using the formula.
Of course Man Beast lives on in home video. I saw it a million or so years ago when I first got a VHS player. It was on one of those great old Johnny Legend comp tapes from Rhino that had a feature, some shorts, and a bunch of trailers. It was nearly impossible to see that sort of thing before videotape became commonplace.
These movies live on for those of us with a taste for cinematic junk food. I write this on Christmas Eve, 2022. It's frigid outside, with fierce wind and single digit temps. Perfect conditions for such a movie. I got up very early, before sunrise, and drank hot tea while I watched Man Beast. I'm grateful to still be here, and still be able to watch these odd treasures.
As for Jerry Warren, he passed on in 1988. He was 63. Just two years older than I am. Maybe, somehow, he still benefits from the joy his movies bring to misfits like me.
Written by Mark Sieber
Even someone as ruthlessly intelligent as Frank Zappa loves Z-Grade horror. One of his most enjoyable songs, "Cheepnis", extols the virtues of bad monster movies.
When people talk about the worst horror and SF movies from the past, titles like Plan 9 from Outer Space, Robot Monster, and Manos: The Hand of Fate tend to come up. I don't hear about Jerry Warren's abominable Man Beast often enough. It's one of the greatest ever made.
Like most California youths, Jerry Warren wanted to be in the motion picture business. As a young man he managed to land bit parts in a few decent movies. He decided to venture out on his own with a movie about the Abominable Snowman, otherwise known as a Yeti.
Warren found an old white gorilla suit used in a couple of Poverty Row productions for his titular beast. He gathered up stock footage of mountain scenes and purchased unused reels from an aborted Mexican movie. He rounded up exactly nine friends to serve as actors. Amusingly, the lead of Man Beast is attributed to one "Rock Madison", portraying a character named Lon Ranyon. In reality there was no person named Rock Madison and no character in Man Beast named Lou Ranyon. In addition to that, the screenplay credit goes to B. Arthur Cassidy. Once again, no such person existed. They cobbled together the plot and dialogue on the cuff as the crew toiled on their cinematic expedition, utilizing the footage they had and the meager abilities of the cast.
For Tibetan scenes Warren and his cast and crew climbed over a fence into a major studio lot and shot on sets previously used for a movie about Mongolia.
Man Beast is truly the stuff of legend.
Some of the mountain footage is actually pretty good. Those Mexican filmmakers had a clue or two about motion picture photography.
The Man Beast plot is as thin as the clothes the mountaineers wear on their Himalayan trek. A woman and her boyfriend set out to find her brother, who went in search of the fabled Yeti. They hire a would-be hunky guide and set off. They meet a group of scientists along the way and of course run afoul of the terrible man beast itself.
Small details bring authenticity to any movie. I love the way the explorers do not even wear gloves. Even when they are sitting in piles of fake snow. One guy wears a fedora adorned with a feather.
The story moves as slowly as a trek up a snowy mountain, but Man Beast growls into high gear when the Yeti begins to trail them up the peak. It's a ridiculous monster that inspires laughs, but maybe unsophisticated audiences were scared back in the mid-50s.
Man Beast dips into more transgressive territory than most movies of its time when it is revealed that the snowmen want to kidnap women to mate with in order to advance their race. This got Warren in a little trouble with British censors, who requires a couple of minutes snipped from the movie for release there.
While the movie didn't exactly set the box office on fire, Man Beast was successful enough for Jerry Warren to have a career in low budget filmmaking. He went on to direct Teenage Zombies, The Incredible Petrified World, Face of the Screaming Werewolf, and the legendary The Wild World of Batwoman. His tactic of incorporating previous footage of foreign movies picked up on the cheap worked well in Man Beast. He continued using the formula.
Of course Man Beast lives on in home video. I saw it a million or so years ago when I first got a VHS player. It was on one of those great old Johnny Legend comp tapes from Rhino that had a feature, some shorts, and a bunch of trailers. It was nearly impossible to see that sort of thing before videotape became commonplace.
These movies live on for those of us with a taste for cinematic junk food. I write this on Christmas Eve, 2022. It's frigid outside, with fierce wind and single digit temps. Perfect conditions for such a movie. I got up very early, before sunrise, and drank hot tea while I watched Man Beast. I'm grateful to still be here, and still be able to watch these odd treasures.
As for Jerry Warren, he passed on in 1988. He was 63. Just two years older than I am. Maybe, somehow, he still benefits from the joy his movies bring to misfits like me.
Written by Mark Sieber
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