COUNTERPLOT

Allison Hayes

COUNTERPLOT (1959). Director: Kurt Neumann.

Brock Miller (Forrest Tucker) is hiding out in San Juan after being accused of murdering a man in New York who owed him money. He has befriended a boy named Manuel (Jackie Wayne), and has a girlfriend, a singer, named Connie (Allison Hayes). Fritz Bergmann (Gerald Milton) a portly lawyer and apparent owner of the club where Connie works, has knowledge that might clear Brock, but there's interference from the victim's business partner, Ben Murdock (Richard Verney). Spargo (Miquel Angel Alvarez) tries to play both men against each other for a price. It all comes together for a final shoot-out. Counterplot has some good acting in it, especially from the dynamic Milton, and Allison Hayes, the 50-foot Woman herself, is warmer and more sympathetic than usual. Jackie Wayne is a talented and appealing child actor who appeared in the original stage production of "Damn Yankees;" Counterplot is his only movie credit. Milton was mostly a television actor who also appeared in Unknown Terror. Forrest Tucker [Fresh from Paris] basically plays the same dull "Forrest Tucker" character. Photographed by Karl Struss [Sunrise], who did many films with director Neumann .

Verdict: A melodrama that holds the attention but never quite catches fire. **1/2.

UNKNOWN TERROR

UNKNOWN TERROR (1957). Director: Charles Marquis Warren.

When a young man disappears while searching for a mysterious cavern known as the “Cave of Death” in South America, his sister (Mala Powers), husband (John Howard) and friend (Paul Richards) decide to go look for him and come across a mad doctor (Gerald Milton) who is experimenting with fungi, allegedly for new antibiotics. Everyone in the small village, including the doctor and his beautiful Indian bride (May Wynn) are tight-lipped about the location of this cave and even deny that it exists, but eventually our intrepid trio make their way inside the place and discover exactly why the cave has such a sinister reputation, to put it mildly. This is a perfectly creditable, atmospheric and well-paced “comic book” movie that piles on one eerie incident after another and has a wild climax that seems derived from everything from H. G. Wells' novel “The Time Machine”with its morlocks to the bogey men/cavern finale of Laurel and Hardy's Babes in Toyland. [Remember, The Time Machine wasn't filmed until seven years later.] It isn't for a moment very reasonable but it is consistently entertaining. In most films of this nature the characters seem to have no real life outside of the story (or any life at all for that matter) but Kenneth Higgins' script at least attempts to create characters who have a convincing back story, and the actors follow suit: for instance, when Paul Richards shows up at the home of Mala Powers, we don't need any dialogue to know that these two were once lovers. For the most part the actors, including May Wynn and Gerald Milton, play with conviction, although the latter does become a little hammy in the final sequences. Powers and Richards certainly deserved bigger parts in better movies, but their work here is nothing they should have been ashamed of. Much – too much – has been made of the fact that the special effects for the big finale are low-tech, to say the least, but the fact is that they are also perfectly effective for a black and white low-budget movie and it is also true that Unknown Terror is creepy and a lot of fun! [Available from Sinister Cinema.]

Verdict: Not great but great fun. **1/2.