Shlock (1973)

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2020) Serendipity can be a cool thing, and so it is that Cable TV scheduling happenstance led to me seeing the first of John Landis’ films (Shlock) less than a week after seeing his last (Burke & Hare). While Landis’ career never really recovered from the on-set deaths during the making of The Twilight Zone: The Movie, the first ten years of his career were a cascade of highly imaginative comedies, with ultra-low-budget Shlock to set the tone. A parody of 1950s monster movies that almost retroactively serves as a lampoon of terrible 1970s creature features and 1980s slashers, Shlock is about a prehistoric creature (Landis in an ape suit) terrorizing a small Southern California town, alternately harming or helping characters. It’s meant to be parodic, so there are plenty of references to 2001: A Space Odyssey, cheap banana jokes and satire of 1970s TV reporting. It would be an exaggeration to call the result any good, but there are a few laughs here and there, and anyone can recognize Landis’ comic invention, so closely would the tone be replicated in later, bigger-budget movies. It’s definitely a curio, but not a bad one for Landis fans.