Tabango

This film is set in some tropical locale--full of savages will silly beliefs and a thirst for blood. Well, actually, it looks like it was filmed in the US and they used the same sort of extras to play natives as you'd have found in "Beach Blanket Bingo"! They look as exotic and foreign as a pot roast and sound just as exotic!!

When "From Hell it Came" begins, a guy is being murdered by the evil priest. His crime? He studied the ways of the white doctors who are there to study these jungle savages and treat plague victims!! Then the film switches to the whiter folks and their work to study the flora, fauna and treat diseases caused by radiation. One of the things they have yet to study is the Tabanga--a supposedly mythical monster that does the bidding of the local evil witch doctor. Imagine their surprise when they find out the Tabanga is real...and out for blood. What is this 'Tabanga'? Well, it's a killer tree...yes, I said tree!!! Not surprisingly, it turns out to be one of the silliest monsters in movie history!

So is the film worth seeing? Absolutely! It's so bad that it's quite funny and it's also a great film to watch with friends so you can all laugh and make comments. Provided, of course, your friends are into that sort of thing.

I always ask this question when reviewing a film like When Hell It Came, was the cast offered nothing better?

Set in the South Seas after some atomic testing scientists Tod Andrews, Tina Carver, and William Clark are there to study the effects of atomic radiation on the natives. It seems as though some typhoon blew the atomic debris in their direction.

But there's some nasty native politics brewing, Gregg Palmer son of the old chief is executed on some trumped up charge concocted by the new head guy and corroborated by Palmer's own wife who is two timing him. Before he dies Palmer says he's coming back to settle accounts.

By God he does when his casket is buried vertically in the ground with him growing out like a tree, one ugly looking tree with a knife that was used to kill Palmer sticking from the bark. When he's uprooted he moves like a Triffid and he's got lots of scores to settle.

They call what he is a Tabanga and he's both ugly and quite laughable instead of scary. The cast just looks anxious more like they're waiting for their checks to clear. Linda Watkins who plays the woman who runs the trading post hams it up with her cockney accent like she just came from a road company of My Fair Lady.

If you're into bad science fiction for laughs this is your film.

Fans looking for absurd, cheesy entertainment from the 1950s will be well served by this cheap and schlocky B-movie, forever remembered in the hearts of bad film buffs as the one about the "killer tree". Forget THE GIANT CLAW, this is the real stuff. Anybody who's seen one of those old-fashioned low-budget 'jungle' movies made on a set in Hollywood will find FROM HELL IT CAME packed full of the stock clichés present from the period, from 'witch doctors' throwing magic exploding powder into flames, to strangely American-looking natives padding out the cast of village extras, to a script which vainly tries to make scientifically-plausible sense of the chaos whilst keeping a healthy level of mumbo-jumbo native superstition bubbling merrily away.

At the end of the day, the film concerns the activities of a walking tree to kill people. The special effects used to animate said tree are appalling; basically it's just some unlucky guy in a silly rubber suit, completed with a goofy face and painted-on eyes. The flexibility of the suit is zero, with just a couple of rubber arms sticking out from each side, so at any point the monster is required to perform an action, it just ends up looking ridiculous. The cast isn't much better; aside from dependable (but ageing) male lead Tod Andrews, there don't appear to be many real actors in the cast list. Most annoying of all is Linda Watkins' character. The American Watkins speaks with a truly grating Cockney accent all of the time, then later on turns out to have supposedly come from Australia! It beggars belief, it really does. Just another whacked-out element to an already incredible movie. An immortal delight for bad-film buffs everywhere.