|
Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned) |
Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!
|
|
|
|
|
For some reason, a crate containing a 50.000 year old, frozen caveman,
Jan-Gel (actually a bald & bearded beer-bellied man dressed in furs,
played by Dale Clukey) gets lost somewhere in West Virginia ... & as
the logic of a film like this goes, Jan-Gel is thawed up & goes on a rampage,
killing people to the left & right. Soon enough, Jan-Gel even kills
the local sheriff (Lester Myers), but not before he has called 2 FBI agents for help,
Conrad Brooks & Colonel West (Gary Schroeder), & soon enough they have picked up the
trail of the beast ... but soon enough, it becomes a race against time, as
the beast has kidnapped a teenage girl, Beth (Beth Simmons).
At first, Beth is scared stiff by the beast, but eventually, Jan-Gel
saves her from a snake attack, & when she treats his wounds, she loses
her fears & Jan-Gel starts trusting her. However, when Jan-Gel after
this encounter takes a little rest, Beth manages to get away, & when
Jan-Gel realizes that, he goes after her, fiercer than ever. But
fortunately he runs right into the arms of the FBI-men, who shoot him,
& in dieing he falls off a cliff ... to his death, as everybody
presumes. But when the coroner comes looking for Jan-Gel, the beast is
gone.
Let me make one thing clear, Jan-Gel is not a good movie,
it's a shot-on-(home)video oddity legendary schlock-actor Conrad Brooks
(yes, the one from the Ed Wood films) shot for fun, using his friends
(mostly beer-bellied men in their 50's or beyond) as actors. (This though
makes it worse as it sounds I suppose, as Brooks has at least a basic
grasp of film-making, the film is properly edited, the sound is adequate
& the music is quite ok & properly used.)
As a whole, Jan-Gel
is a weird hommage to the cinema of yesteryear, when a plot required
little more than a good guy, a monster & a girl, without much
scientific mumbojumbo added. & that noone takes the film too
seriously, the monster is not in the least
convincing & the actors look like a mix of weirdos & people way
too old to play moviemaking only adds to the weird atmosphere of the
movie.
As I said though, this doesn't make Jan-Gel a good movie,
however, for some strange reason you might enjoy it nevertheless.
|